VCFA Mission
Vermont College
of Fine Arts
is a national center
for education in
the arts, fostering the
excellence of
emerging and
established artists
and advancing
the arts to create a
more humane world.

ABOUT VCFA

THIS PUBLICATION

Vermont College of Fine Arts

This is the Summer 2011

(VCFA) is a place where
the creative expression of
individuals is nurtured and a
sense of community ﬂourishes;
a place where national and
international leaders in the arts
gather, teach, learn, and show
and perform their work.
From our hilltop campus in
Montpelier, Vermont, we seek
to help shape the future of the
arts worldwide by fostering the
excellence of emerging and established artists. We recognize
that the arts are central to the
development of a creative and
healthy society. We encourage
our members to reach for the
highest artistic standards as
individuals and to share their
talents with humanity.
Awarding Master of Fine Arts
degrees (MFAs) in a variety of
ﬁelds of practice, VCFA
offers student-centered graduate programs. Yet we have a
singular mission: to provide a
world-class graduate education
in the ﬁne arts. All our efforts
are turned in this direction. Our
commitment is reﬂected in the
quality of our programs and
the successes of our students.

letter from the president
Last week I had the chance to spend several days in Washington, DC, and
was able to catch up with many old VCFA friends from the capital area. I also
traveled with my wife and daughter and spent some time as a tourist, going
through the museums and the monuments on the national mall. I was struck,
as you cannot help but be, by how much architecture—and art—conveys both
meaning and history. Standing on the steps of the Lincoln Monument and
looking out toward the Washington Monument and the Capital building,
the grandeur is extraordinary, but looking down to the spot where Martin
Luther King Jr. delivered his “I have a Dream Speech,” and knowing that
some forty-odd years later the ﬁrst African American President is in the
White House, the feeling is one of humility, pride, and also sadness that
we have come so far, but still have so far to go as people.
But the image that stayed with me the most from the trip was standing in
front of the Vietnam War Memorial. Designed by Maya Lin when she was only
twenty-one years old, I found myself overcome by the scale, the number of
names, the human beings who lost their lives in a war that never should have
happened. And the sheer beauty of what she created is such that as you stand
there looking at the names, in the granite you see the staggering scope of the
lives lost, but you see something else as well: you see yourself. It is as if the
monument itself is reﬂecting our own humanity and asking us the question,
what does this mean for you?
And that for me is what is at the heart of artistic endeavor: the fundamental
idea that when we create and express ourselves, we are somehow reﬂecting
our own humanity for the world to see. Most of us will never have the
opportunity to reach the audience that Maya Lin did with her magniﬁcent
elegy to those who were killed half a world away. But that it is not the point.
It is the trying that matters, and in these pages you will read proﬁles of
members of our community who are doing just that. Whether our medium
is music, design, literature or visual art, when we create I believe we are,
in ways both big and small, making a difference.

Thomas Christopher Greene
President, VCFA

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cycles of success
getting better all the time
The creative process is traditionally described as a linear progression of four steps: preparation, incubation, illumination, and implementation. Yet contemporary theorists view
creativity more as a continuous, cyclical process of observing, reﬂecting, and making.
As artists, we take a leap every time we initiate this cycle. Often we ﬂy a bit, while other
times we hit the pavement. Either way, it is our nature to leap again.
As we create, we learn from the experience, developing our skills and honing our awareness. If we stick with it, we begin to succeed more than we fail. With our successes, we
become more comfortable with the risks. So we leap again—farther. New challenges lift us
over our previous boundaries and limitations. We become more creative.
At VCFA, we are deeply concerned with the creative process. Not only because we teach
creative practices, but as a growing and evolving institution we rely on creativity to build
a college that reﬂects the spirit of our educational programs. The energy that inspires our
students of writing, music, graphic design and visual art is the same energy that we tap
into to build VCFA.
As you read this newsletter, you’ll meet a group of creative people equally focused on
individual artistic pursuits and on the development of a community. You’ll read stories
of persistence, transformation, and success. Some of these stories focus on our students,
alumni, or faculty. Some describe the leaps VCFA is making as an educational institution.
Yet they are all one story.
It is not only the story of observing, reﬂecting, and making, but also a testament to the
rewards of taking risks, leaping forward, and continuing the creative process at VCFA.

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Detail from skinďŹ zz/swim
Meg Brown Payson, MFA 1993
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RickBait
B AC K I N THE 8 0 s , Rick Baitz composed the

dent at Columbia University, he composed scores

score for a kooky indie ﬁlm about drug dealers

for his brother’s theatrical and television produc-

in Britain, including a samba for, of all things, a

tions. Drawing on his roots in ethnic music, he

string quartet and harp. The harp played tradi-

infused his compositions with primal, elemental

tional patterns of the berimbau—a one-bowed

motifs from traditional dance and spirituality.

instrument native to northeastern Brazil—while

But his career as a ﬁlm composer didn’t

the strings featured abstract rhythms and har-

take off until he learned how to run a

monics. “Like everything I was doing in my

recording studio as arranger and producer

twenties, it was very creative,” he explains. “I

of African folk songs for an educational CD

loved it because it allowed me to access dif-

project. With the credential he needed to dive

ferent parts of myself. But it took years for

into the business, he was rolling. He wrote music

me to put words to what I was doing.”

for all kinds of productions, including The Vagina

Rick grew up between Los Angeles,

Monologues (HBO, 2002), Body & Soul: Diana &

Brazil, and South Africa, where he soaked up

Kathy (PBS, 2009), and eight National Geographic

indigenous music traditions. While a doctoral stu-

documentaries. For each, he wove elements of

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z
Brazilian, African, or Indian music into more formal,

and structure of the ﬁlm,” he notes. “Concert

Western structures. Rick immediately took to the

music, on the other hand, allows the artist to make

challenge of making ﬁlm music that works as music

his own statement musically, rather than support

but also supports the action, helps the story move

someone else’s idea.”

forward, and embodies the inner life of the charac-

Now Rick strikes a balance between con-

ters. Eventually, he realized what he loved about it:

cert music and scoring for ﬁlm. “Finally,” Rick

“When I compose for ﬁlm, I work instinctively and

observes, “the false dichotomies between

intuitively. Some people think the music in a ﬁlm

stylistic ﬁfedoms are breaking down.” He

isn’t supposed to be heard. I don’t agree. But I

welcomes the fusion of rock and jazz, tonal and

believe it has to act on the unconscious mind in

atonal music, music for ﬁlm and concert music,

ways that the viewer doesn’t perceive.”

and so on. “I’m so happy to be alive in 2011, and

Despite his success in ﬁlm, Rick felt the

in New York City, especially. Most of my friends

urge to return to concert music, to once

are doing ﬁlm music and concert music and jazz

again be the driving force behind a musical

—and everybody celebrates the possibilities. It’s all

work. “Film music is controlled by the elements

music, and it’s all creativity.”

By Susannah Noel

Africa,
Brazil, and the
Unconscious
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Marriage
by Design
The Surfer and the Yogi

by Kate Youngdahl

Anyone can catch a wave in July. February is the test of true dedication. VCFA Graphic Design
faculty member Rafael Attias says deciding to brave winter’s icy waters to surf the Rhode Island
coast is always “an internal struggle.” But the effort inevitably pays off. “To take the time,
paddle through the waves, and catch a good one, it’s so simple and so beautiful to do that.”
Pushing the edges of the comfort zone is a way of life for Attias and his wife, fellow VCFA
faculty member Nicole Juen. The two balance teaching at VCFA and Rhode Island School of
Design with their ﬂourishing design studio, their personal art projects, and a family. Far from
overwhelming them, the juggling act seems to energize Attias and Juen. “Flexibility happens
in all kinds of incarnations,” says Juen. “We ﬁnd ways through really splitting up the responsibilities, conquering and dividing. It’s very rich.”
It helps that the couple is temperamentally matched like Jack Spratt and his wife. If the
action packed and often dangerous world of surﬁng is Attias’ release, Juen embraces yoga
and eastern philosophy. An accomplished electronic musician and video painter, Attias strides
comfortably through the digital realm. Juen is strictly old school, a self described print and
“typography geek.” Attias grew up in Venezuela; Juen’s family is Austrian. The result, according to Attias, is a marriage of “earth and ether.”
The friendly clash of cultures reaps big rewards for clients of Matter, the couple’s design
studio. “We deﬁnitely don’t see eye-to-eye on everything. And we’re talking twenty years of a
relationship,” says Juen. “We couldn’t always have worked together, but I think now we really
see each other’s strengths and abilities.” Their collaborative approach extends to the client as
well, notes Attias. “We educate people about the design process. They know what they like, but
they don’t know what it takes to get to a good solution. Together, we whittle down the options
that best suit them. It’s an exercise in non-ego.”
The philosophy spills over into the couples’ classrooms as well. “I am very interested in
leading the students to understand themselves completely, deeply, honestly,” says Juen. “I
want them to know how they produce and process work, what they are actually capable of.”
Attias believes one way to do that is by taking students “out of their comfort zone, not necessarily where they get to show their technical prowess, but their creative output.” Once there,
he encourages them to shake off preconceived notions about process. “Solve your intention
the best possible way. If it’s by welding, then go weld —even in my digital class!”
Art thrives on connections—not barriers—between disciplines. “You have to be broad
—intake, inhale and digest everything,” says Juen. “As I get older, I start to see less separation
in everything.” Maybe that’s one clue to the couple’s success. For whether it is born inside the
curl of a wave or a salute to the sun, inspiration must be nurtured. Turns out, that is a dance
that a surfer and a yogi do very well together

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“Flexibility happens
in all kinds of incarnations.
It’s very rich.”

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E

“We understand
the transformative power
of these programs and the imperative to
retain what’s critically important to them.”

Artist

Joan Grubin
Visualizes our Future
By Susannah Noel
F O R J O A N G R U B I N (MFA ‘03), VCFA is both a safe haven and a place of challenge and
risk. Her satisfaction and accomplishments as an artist stem from the questions she was encouraged to explore as a student here. Now, in her role as trustee, she relies on these experiences to
guide the College as it increases its ability to enrich the lives of artists and art education.
“Current art education is struggling with its relationship to the marketplace, Grubin explains. “Art schools are asking, ‘Is our purpose to teach students how to succeed within the art
world? Or should we encourage students to question the increase of art as a commodity and offer
them a refuge from that marketplace?‘” She contributes to the Board her ﬁrst-hand knowledge
of the Visual Art program—and VCFA as a whole—as a place where students are free to explore
new avenues, ﬁnd their voice, and take artistic risks.
Yet Grubin is certain that her work has evolved as a direct result of the challenges offered
by the faculty and environment of the MFA program. “There’s no way I’d be doing what I’m doing
now if I hadn’t subjected myself to the challenging nature of that program,” she says.
Arriving at VCFA as a painter, she quickly responded to the mandate to abandon her comfort zone, and pushed her painting into territory dealing with issues of sculpture and installation.
Now she describes her work as “a hybrid combining painting, sculpture, and installation that uses
color and light to explore the act of seeing itself.”
The unexpected foray she’s taken into art that doesn’t ﬁt a particular genre surprises and
amuses her. “My work now asks more questions than it answers,” she admits, while clearly enjoying the results. Her installations have appeared in numerous New York galleries, as well as at
colleges and universities, such as her recent shows at the University of Maine at Orono, and Union
County College in Cranford, NJ.
Eager to repay VCFA’s contribution to her evolution as an artist, Grubin was honored to
join the Board of Trustees at its inception in 2007. Over time, her participation on the Board has
become a passion in itself. She now chairs the Academic Affairs Committee, which focuses on
how the College’s various curricula carry out its mission.
Grubin is proud to be one of several alumni on the Board. “We have personal experience
with this model of education,” she explains, noting how they are uniquely suited to keeping the
project of the College in line with its core values. “It would be easy to devolve into a trade school
—a ‘how-to’ of art,” she continues. “But we know it’s much more than that. We’ve lived it . We
understand the transformative power of these programs and the imperative to retain what’s critically important to them.”

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Robin Oliveira
Makes a Name for Herself
By Kate Youngdahl

Persistence,

Robin Oliveira insists,

is key to her success.

And

yet, there came a time while writing her riveting ﬁrst novel, My Name Is Mary Sutter, when just
pushing through wasn’t enough. “I was so stuck. Every third day, I thought I’d quit and become a barrista.” Her stumbling block: the story’s emotional turning point, when the heroine
must overcome crippling doubts or give up her dream. With Oliveira’s own dream hanging in
the balance, she called an old mentor, a professor from VCFA, and explained her struggle with
her main character. “He asked me one very simple question: ‘What does her soul want?’”
That gentle nudge broke Oliveira’s creative logjam, and in a very real sense, a star was born.
In the last year, My Name Is Mary Sutter has garnered dazzling reviews and a spot on
the coveted independent book dealers’ Indie Next list. Oliveira’s deeply researched historical novel provides a remarkable window on the American Civil War and nineteenth century
medicine. Set in Albany, NY, and Washington, DC, the story revolves around Mary Sutter, a
strong-willed young midwife whose desire to become a surgeon conﬂicts with hidebound societal norms. “Mary’s pursuit is for knowledge,” says Oliveira, a pursuit the author can relate
to. “That’s me. All my life I’ve asked, why shouldn’t I be able to speak Russian. Why shouldn’t
I be a nurse? Why shouldn’t I write a novel?”
Good questions all, but not a single one yielded a quick answer. Oliveira’s circuitous
route to Mary Sutter began with a lifelong obsession with reading. It was the one constant
through the youthful years of studying Russian, a much loved career in nursing, and raising
a family in Seattle. All along, the inner writer bided her time as Oliveira’s life unfolded. And
then, in her forties, the itch became irresistible. She produced “some bad short stories and
one bad novel left in a drawer.” She also came to a realization. “There has to be something
that I don’t know yet.”
In 2003, Oliveira enrolled at VCFA hoping to unlock the secrets of her craft. She left
with much more, a validation that her gift was real and her dream attainable. “They believed
that I wanted what I wanted. The people at VCFA took my intelligence and intentions seriously.” If the instructors gave her skills and conﬁdence, fellow students provided a sense of community. “During the residencies, you have intense bonding experiences. In their real lives they
could be doctors, lawyers, housewives, but here we are all writers. You think, I’m not alone.”
Though Oliveira wrote most of Mary Sutter after leaving VCFA, she says the program
played a critical role in the novel’s fruition. She marvels at her ongoing relationship with her
mentors, especially one who picked up the phone and gave Mary—and her creator—the
strength to go on when all else failed. “That generous moment happened two years after
graduating,” Oliveira says. “That’s the gift of Vermont College. It’s like you never graduate.”
Or as if you never have to be alone.
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Kate Hosford

Big Hair

on a Mission
By Mckenzie Brown
K A T E H O S F O R D once read through a ﬁre alarm. Enthralled, she noticed neither her
elementary school emptying out nor the piercing noise. “I always read,” she remembers,
“always.” A recent graduate of VCFA’s MFA in Writing for Children & Young Adults, Kate comes
from a family of readers. Even her mother had to be restricted to only one night a week of reading during dinner.
Kate came to writing after reading her way through a B.A. in English and Philosophy,
after starting a family, working in adoption and foster care, and teaching elementary school in
San Francisco, Hong Kong, and New York. Though she trained and worked as an illustrator, feeling she didn’t have the skill to draw all the wonderful things in her imagination, Kate turned to
words as her true medium.
Learning about VCFA’s MFA in Writing for Children & Young Adults from friend and alum
Tamara Smith, Kate was intrigued, but worried about formal studies taking over her personal
writing. She soon found the sustenance she needed in the detailed, relevant work as well as
the nurturing climate of the program. “Writing can be so lonely, and to have that community is
so important. The moral support and feedback from fellow students and professors was vital.”
In VCFA’s environment of both challenge and support, Kate’s writing ﬂourished. “I was
able to revise with more conﬁdence. Now I don’t worry about having to discard multiple drafts.
If I hadn’t gone to VCFA, I don’t know what I would have been like when it came to scrapping a
draft and starting over. I learned that’s just part of the process.”
Kate’s ﬁrst children’s book, Big Bouffant, was published in the spring of 2011, just before
her graduating residency. For the release, she wanted a good hook, one worthy of her story of
creativity and courage. “The main character believes in herself and dares to be different,”
she explains. Her publisher, Lerner Publishing Group, agreed to a major promotional campaign
that would celebrate individuality and self-esteem, but be as whimsical as the book’s colorful
illustrations.
Fittingly, the idea for the innovative and highly successful launch of Big Bouffant came
from a little girl. The daughter of former MFA-WC&YA Program Director Katie Gustafson gave
the book two thumbs up, but wanted to know how to make a bouffant. “It dawned on me,”
Kate says, “that the author of Big Bouffant should be able to teach children how to make one.”
Now wherever she goes, bouffants and other wild hairstyles appear on boys and girls alike,
inspired by both Annabelle, the book’s protagonist, and Kate herself.
While every book-signing is a party for Kate, she is also carrying out the social mission of
the Writing for Children & Young Adults program. “I hope the book emboldens children to take
risks, whether that means turning their hair into works of art or making a different statement about
themselves,” says Kate. “Hair itself isn’t important, but it can be a means of self-expression.”

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Class Notes
Project Space at NY Studio Gallery
from March 17 – April 9, 2011.
(MFA-V)
Kate Reuther (2008) and Eric
Anderson (2008) participated in a
project for chapbookpublisher.com,
writing 300 – 400 words a day for
the month of November. It’s a weird
project – part diary, part diatribe,
almost impossible to explain – and
then to make it even more bizarre,
all 30 entries have been published as
individual books; 30 authors, each
with 30 individual two-page books.
(MFA-W)
Karin Huxman, Patty Lyman
Schremmer and Joyce Ray – all
three are alumnae from 2001 – are
contributing authors of Women
of the Empire State: 25 New York
Women You Should Know, a newly
released title in the America’s Notable Women series from Apprentice
Shop Books. (MFA-WCYA)

Current Students

Group
Work from Vermont College of
Fine Arts MFA in Visual Arts
alumni Scott Cantrell, Leah
Grimaldi (both 2011 grads) and
current VCFA student Linda King
Ferguson was chosen to be part
of the North American Graduate
Art Survey annual exhibition. Their
work was selected from 700 pieces
and was on display at the Katherine
E. Nash Gallery in the Regis Center
for Art at the University of Minnesota this past February. (MFA-V)
Suzanne Fellows (2009) and
Jane S. Noel (2006) had a joint
show in April titled, Moving on.
The exhibition was at the Schmidt
Gallery of the GoggleWorks Center
for the Arts in Reading, PA, and
ran from April 1 – April 18, 2011.
(MFA-V)
Deidra Krieger (2008) curated
a new exhibition titled Let’s Play

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Nice at SINErgy Project Space +
Gallery in Philadelphia. The show
also includes work by VCFA Alumni
Abby Sadauckas (2007), Amanda Dillingham (2008), Jacob
Galle (2005), Kat Schnek (2008)
and Denise Karabinus Telang
(2009). The works investigate play
and invite viewer participation
while offering critiques of topics
as varied as identity, the wedding
industry, the art world, and early
rave culture. It ran through April
16, 2011. (MFA-V)
Robert O’Connor (2006) had
an exhibition of new work titled
Facing Laramie, featuring sound by
fellow alumnus Matt Page (2006).
This new work was a reﬂection on
a recent trip O’Connor made to
Laramie, WY, made notorious in
1998 by the brutal murder of a gay
University of Wyoming student,
Matthew Shepard. It was at the LZ

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Molly Heron was part of a
group exhibition at Gallery Joe in
Philadelphia titled New Talent 2010.
It was an exhibition of drawings
featuring four artists, all new to the
gallery. It opened on November
20 and ran through December 18,
2010. (MFA-V)
Laura Jensen’s Master of Arts
thesis was judged and awarded the
UNK College of Fine Arts & Humanities best creative thesis award
for the 2009 – 2010 academic year.
(MFA-WCYA)
Lyn Miller-Lachmann’s young
adult novel Gringolandia was on
the 2010 ALA Best Books for Young
Adults list and the 2010 Bank Street
College Best Children’s Books list.
In addition, it received an IPPY
Gold Medal and an Américas
Award Honorable Mention from
the Consortium of Latin American
Studies Programs. First published
by Curbstone Press, the novel is
now distributed by Northwestern
University Press as a crossover title.
(MFA-WCYA)
Meg Wiviott’s book Benno and
the Night of Broken Glass made the

“

This program was exactly what I needed as a writer and as an individual.

While my abilities as a writer existed before this program, they were rough and unpolished. They needed honing and reﬁnement – something that could only happen among
a nurturing, yet frank environment, like the one at VCFA. I will be forever grateful.
—Laurie Goodman, current student

School Library Journal Best Picture
Books of 2010 list. (MFA-WCYA)
2011
Merry Gangemi’s long poem,
“Invitation,” has been accepted for
Sinister Wisdom’s spring 2010 issue.
In addition, she will co-edit Sinister
Wisdom’s fall 2011 issue with Julie
R. Enszer (U MD). (MFA-W)
Diana Gonsalves will be part
of a group show at the Flynn in
Burlington, VT. She launched her
new artist’s website at dianavt.com
and was a visiting artist at Lamoille
Union High School in the Image
Making class. She is working on two
new series, starting with going back
into the darkroom. (MFA-V)
Leah Grimaldi has a new show
opening in Boston this June. The
show, titled INN3R, includes

VCFA

“

SCBWI picture text competition.
(MFA-WCYA)
Melinda Thomsen’s poetry
chapbook, Field Rations, has been
accepted for publication by Finishing Line Press for release in July
2011. In addition, her VCFA graduation lecture that she gave on New
Year’s Day, 2011, “William Matthews: A Well Spoken, Worldly, and
Ironic Gentleman,” will appear in
the spring 2011 issue of the online
journal, Big City Lit. (MFA-W)

installation and paintings by Leah
Grimaldi and Chris Spuglio, and
is at the Atlantic Works Gallery
in East Boston. It opens on June
10 and runs through July 9, 2011.
(MFA-V)
Kate Hosford held a launch
party to mark the release of her
ﬁrst picture book, Big Bouffant,
at Books of Wonder in New York
City on March 4, 2011. A team of
moms made bouffants for the girls
and many different hairstyles for
the boys. A picture of the party was
featured as the Picture of the Day in
Publisher’s Weekly a few days later.
Kate has been doing school visits in
New York and book signings/hair
parties at bookstores in Northern
California. (MFA-WCYA)
Sarah Blake Johnson received
special recognition in the national

2010
Q Lindsey Barrett’s story “Toronado” won Honorable Mention in
the Bacopa Fiction Award and will
be published in the 2011 issue of
Bacopa. Her ﬂash ﬁction “Warrior Blues” was published in Night

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Class Notes
Train’s Firebox Fiction. In addition,
Drunken Boat has slated her story
“Fissures” for a special Contemporary Women’s Writing folio, and
“Racking the Slide” was selected
for Night Train’s spring issue. Her
review of Solares’ Yankee Invasion
appears in the spring 2011 issue of
Los Angeles Review. (MFA-W)
Luc Demers’ recent show, titled
Darkened Rooms, at the Coleman
Burke Gallery in New York was reviewed in The New Yorker. The review
talked of the show’s “handsome photographs” that evoke comparisons to
“Rothko, Barnett Newman, and Ad
Reinhardt.” (MFA-V)
Sara Desmond was a ﬁnalist for
the Rick DeMarinis Short Story
Award through Cutthroat, A Journal
for the Arts. (MFA-W)
Collette Fournier exhibited photography at the Upstream Gallery
for their show Photography Takes
Over 2010, in Dobbs Ferry and at
the Calumet Gallery in New York
City for Kamoinge: In the Moment.
Collette was also nominated for the
NAACP award and was honored for

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(continued)

her service to the NAACP ACT-SO
Program at the Nyack NAACP Freedom Fund Dinner. (MFA-V)
Janet Fox’s debut young adult
novel, Faithful (Speak/Penguin,
2010), is on the 2011 Amelia
Bloomer List of the ALA; her second and companion novel, Forgiven
comes out in June 2011 and is a
2011 Junior Library Guild Selection. (MFA-WCYA)
David French was part of a group
exhibition in Asbury Park, NJ, this
spring. The event, titled Compositions in Music and Art ran March
19 – May 8, 2011. He also had a solo
exhibit of new paintings at Simon
Gallery in Morristown. NJ, and he
was part of another exhibit in Aspen, CO, where he exhibited works
on paper and “found/ready-made
paintings.” (MFA-V)
Susan Holt is teaching an Art
History class on Venice and will be
taking the students to the Biennale
this summer. (MFA-V)
Timothy Kercher’s manuscript
Nobody’s Odyssey was selected as
a ﬁnalist for the 2010 John Ciardi

newsletter summer 2011

Prize for Poetry. Eighty poems and
translations have appeared or are
forthcoming in a number of recent
literary publications, including
Crazyhorse, Versal, Quiddity, The
Dirty Goat, Poetry International
Journal, upstreet, The Minnesota
Review, Guernica, Los Angeles Review
and many others. Most importantly, his wife Allison gave birth to
twin daughters, Ani and Ketevan.
(MFA-W)
Kevin Knopp had a solo exhibition titled Meter of Thought, a
retrospective of his work this past
fall at the Tomorrow River Gallery
in Amherst, WI. (MFA-V)
Michelle (Mikki) Knudsen has a
new picture book, Argus, illustrated
by Andréa Wesson and published
by Candlewick Press. It was released
February 22, 2011. (MFA-WCYA)
Emily Lanctot had a show at The
DeVos Art Museum at Northern
Michigan University in Marquette.
The show, titled UP FOCUS: Ryan
Brayak and Emily Lanctot, ran
through April 3, 2011. (MFA-V)
Mark McCaig received an
Individual Artist Award from the
Maryland State Arts Council for
2011. (MFA-W)
Celeste Provencher’s essay, “The
Pleasures of Food in Poetry,” was
recently published on Poetrybay.
com. (MFA-W)
Susa Silvermarie was selected
by the A Room of Her Own Retreat
Fellowship Committee as the recipient of the Wise Woman Fellowship.
This fellowship is “granted to a
woman writer over 60 in recognition that many women are at the
height of their creative abilities in
later decades.” Susa is currently
teaching English to sixth graders
as a volunteer at in Yelapa, Mexico.
(MFA-WCYA)
Holly Simonsen had two poems
in the April edition of Hayden’s
Ferry Review titled “two resting
blackbirds” and “Shed.” She also
has one poem forthcoming from
ellipsis, “Salt Flat, Winter Solstice.”
(MFA-W)
Lisa Ulik had an artist lecture at
the University of Wisconsin, La
Crosse in October 2010, as part of
their colloquium series, The Nature
of Identity. She also had a drawing,
Feminine Goddess-type Woman

“

The MFA program at VCFA has made a signiﬁcant difference

in my writing. Each semester, my advisor has challenged me

with Nipples and Stomach Unclothed, Holding a Moon, published
in Randy Magazine in connection
with Ulrike Müller’s Herstory
Inventory. Recent exhibitions
include, EFFJAY Projekts Inaugural
Group Exhibition in Sheboygan,
WI, 2011, and On Deck, Skate Deck
Exhibition & Art Auction at montanaskatepark.org in Missoula, MT.
(MFA-V)
Blair Vaughn-Gruler and her
husband have opened GVG Contemporary in Santa Fe. Blair and
Ernst show and promote their own
work as well as that of other artists,
including Nicholas Gadbois’s
(2009) show, Topography. VaughnGruler is having a one-person
exhibition at GVG Contemporary
in July, titled Dangerous Playground:
New Paintings by Blair VaughnGruler. She is also having a oneperson exhibition at the College of
Southern Nevada in Las Vegas in
October. (MFA-V)
Cheryl Wilder is now writing for
the online web-zine Architects +
Artisans, a site dedicated to honoring, as the sub-title says, “thoughtful design in a sustainable world.”
(MFA-W)

to stretch. I have been able to delve deeply into my chosen genres.
With the afﬁrmation and encouragement of my advisors, I also
have tried a new genre: the novel in poems. I have entered a
dynamic and supportive community of children’s writers—one I will

“

have for a lifetime. What a privilege! Coming to VCFA is one
of the best decisions I’ve ever made.
— Mary E. Cronin, MFA-WCYA, 2011

2009
Martin Balgach’s poem “Too
Much Breath” appeared in Fogged
Clarity, “Running From Highway
287” in The Dirty Napkin, “Thrill
Wanting Wormhole” in The Puritan
and “Giving” in Timber. His poem
“Lightly Aligned with Microphones
and Pitchforks” appears in the
spring print issue of CaKe: A Journal of Poetry & Art. Martin recently
read at the University of Colorado’s
Museum of Natural History as part
of the museum’s Integrating Science
and Poetry program. His poem, “A
Puzzle Made of Stone” is currently
on exhibit in the museum beside a
33 million year old fossil. (MFA-W)
Nellie Bellows’ poem “The Dixie”
will appear in the spring 2011
Americana issue of The Southern
Review, and has recent poems published in Gulf Coast. (MFA-W)
Ginny Connors has had poems
appear in Touching: Poems of
Love, Longing, and Desire (Fearless
Books), English Journal, Naugatuck

a humanities teacher at Boston
Latin Academy in the Boston Public
School system and would love to
hear from folks in his graduating
class. (MFA-W)
Michelle Hagewood moved to
New York to work at the Guggenheim Museum as an Education
Associate. Group shows included
Ordinary Expands at Goucher
College, Baltimore, MD; Where it
Takes You at Spattered Columns at
Art Connects New York; and Wide
Open curated by Nat Trotman at
the Brooklyn Waterfront Artists
Coalition. (MFA-V)
Jonathan Marrs had his ﬁrst
solo show, When the Time is, at
The Tribute Gallery in Portland,
OR, and participated in a two
person show, Looking Through at
Paciﬁc Northwest College of Art. In
November, Jonathan’s short ﬁlm
With You was selected and screened
at the Zero Film Festival in New
York. (MFA-V)

River Review, Caduceus and on
yourdailypoem.com. One of her
poems was performed by the East
Haddam Stage Company as part of
their “Plays and Poetry” program,
and another poem was featured in
an art plus poetry exhibit produced
by Open Studio in Hartford, CT.
(MFA-W)
Mark Dial had a screening of two
short ﬁlms at the Western Illinois
Museum and the West Central Illinois Arts Center on April 2, 2011.
The ﬁlms’ titles are McDonough
County and Plain Folk. (MFA-V)
Nicolas Gadbois had a solo show,
titled Flood, at GVG Contemporary
gallery in Santa Fe, NM, in June
2011. Nicolas has been hired to
teach drawing at Santa Fe Community College for 2011. (MFA-V)
Myles Gordon has had poetry
accepted for publication in 2011
in the journals Slipstream and
RATTLE (poems written during
his VCFA years). Myles is currently

VCFA

|

newsletter summer 2011

19

Class Notes
Richard Moore’s creative nonﬁction piece “Crossing Erez,” was
published in the March 15, 2011
online edition of Guernica magazine. (MFA-W)
Annemarie O’Brien is teaching
writing for children courses at UC
Berkeley and Stanford. (MFAWCYA)
Beverly Parayno interviewed
Tess Gallagher on her work, and the
literary legacy of Raymond Carver
at the Frank O’Connor International Short Story Festival in Cork,
Ireland. Her story, titled “House
Cleaning,” (which she worked on
with Abby Frucht) is forthcoming
online in Narrative. “Wildﬂowers”
will appear online in Southword in
April. (MFA-W)
Angela Small had two stories

“

(continued)

The campus is beautiful, the students all talented, the faculty

accessible, the atmosphere stimulating and supportive. This isn’t
just a place to go to learn how to write better and earn a degree.

“

It’s a place to ﬁnd some of the challenge and sympathy you lack
in the real world, and make the best of your work and yourself.
—Malcolm Campbel, MFA 2008

March 2011 issue of the online
magazine, InfectiveINk. (MFA-W)
Adam Tavel recently won the
14th Annual Robert Frost Award.
He was a ﬁnalist for the 2010 Intro
Poetry Prize with Four Way Books
and a semi-ﬁnalist for the 2010
Paumanok Poetry Award. His new
poems appear or are forthcoming

view was Ben’s graduating Critical
Thesis for VCFA. In addition, his
chapbook, Sometimes Out of Turn,
was one of the two runners up for
the Stonewall Chapbook Competition sponsored by BrickHouse
Books. Also, The Battered Suitcase
Literary Journal accepted three of
his poems for publication in the
March/June 2011 issue. (MFA-W)
2008

accepted for publication: “A
Girl’s Guide to Electricity” will be
published in the next issue of the
online publication Verdad, a literary
and ﬁne arts journal, and her short
“21 Westwood” will appear in the

20

VCFA

|

in Indiana Review, Phoebe, New
South, ellipsis, At Length, Devils Lake
and elsewhere. (MFA-W)
Ben Westlie’s interview with the
late poet Rane Arroyo was accepted
by The Sewanee Review. This inter-

newsletter summer 2011

damali abrams is producing a
weekly TV series on MNN called
Self-Help TV, documenting each
day of 2011 through videos posted
online on her YouTube channel.
In February, she spoke on a panel
called Sonic Art and Activism, and
on April 14, 2011, her short ﬁlm
was screened at Rush Arts Gallery
in New York City. (MFA-V)
Deanna Benjamin’s nonﬁction
micro-stories “Gilded” and “Fluorescence” will appear in upcoming
issues of Fifth Wednesday Journal
and The Carolina Quarterly, respectively. (MFA-W)
Vanessa Blakeslee has a story
forthcoming in Drunken Boat. Her
poetry has recently appeared in
the Superstition Review, MAYDAY
magazine and Prick of the Spindle.
She has recently been awarded
residencies from Yaddo, the Atlantic
Center for the Arts and the Ragdale
Foundation. (MFA-W)
Pamela Calore’s multimedia
work, titled The Line That Divides:
NAFTA Trade Corridor, was
featured in a one-person show,
at the American Labor Museum,
Botto House National Landmark
in Haleden, NJ, this spring. In
addition, Pam will exhibit a photo
essay of New Bedford, MA, titled
“Time Has Left its Mark” at the
New Bedford Art Museum, June 8 –

September 11, 2011. (MFA-V)
Jewel Beth Davis’ creative
nonﬁction piece, “What I Didn’t
Know,” will be published in Fiction
Fix in May. Her creative nonﬁction story, “The Unexamined Life,”
was published in Diverse Voices
Quarterly and was nominated for
Dzanc Book’s Best of the Web 2011.
(MFA-W)
Stacy K. Heiney’s poem, “The
Breaking Around Us is Huge,” won
the 2011 ﬁrst annual Bunchgrass
Poetry Prize. Her poems “Chattering Dream Cycle” and “Troubadour” appear in the fall 2010 issue
of Kestrel. Her experimental poem
“The Bradbury Pieces” appears in
the current issue of Hunger Mountain. (MFA-W)
Michael Hemery illuminates an
honest working-class existence in
his new nonﬁction book, No Permanent Scars, published by Silenced
Press. Intertwined with serious
issues such as class discrimination,
suicide, alcoholism, abuse, religion
and immigration, is humor and
love of family. (MFA-W)
Ashley Seitz Kramer won the
2010 Robert and Adele Schiff
Poetry Prize, judged by Don Bogen
and Michael Grifﬁth. Her winning
poem, “Winter Storyboard,” will appear in the spring 2011 issue of The
Cincinnati Review. (MFA-W)

Diedra Krieger had two videos
in the Vox VI emerging artist
exhibition, juried by William Powhida and Jennifer Dalton. Plastic
Fantastic, covered in water bottles,
journeyed out for Philly’s Art in
the Open 2010, juried by Janet
Kaplan and Lee Stoetzel. Diedra
also participated in Philadelphia
Underground for DesignPhiladelphia collecting subway videos that
were projected as part of the event.
Fellow alums Yip Chan (2009)
and Olaitan Callender
Scott (2009) also contributed videos. (MFA-V) At #rank, Winkleman
Gallery, Seven, Miami, Diedra co-

VCFA

hosted with damali abrams Building Backbones, a group reading of
artists’ rejection letters. (MFA-V)
Maria Driscoll McMahon has
been accepted to participate in
MARK’11, the competitive New
York Foundation for the Arts’ professional development program for
artists in New York. (MFA-V)
Julie Puma was juried into a show
in honor of Spike Lee in Brooklyn,
and had a solo show (installation) on the campus where she
teaches. In August she was hired as
an Assistant Professor in foundations and recently got promoted
to Chair of Online Education. She

|

newsletter summer 2011

21

Class Notes
just entered a show at the Orange
County Center for Contemporary
Art titled Pixels: The Art of iPhone
Photography. (MFA-V)
Trent Reedy’s novel, Words in
the Dust, was chosen by Al Roker
for the Today Show’s Book Club.
The book was his creative thesis at
VCFA. (MFA-WCYA)
Linda Smith will be part of a
juried group show titled Outside/
Inside at GoggleWorks Center in
Reading, PA, in May. She is also
organizing an exhibit of work by art
museum security guards to be held
at Towson ARTS Collective in Towson, MD, from late-August through
mid-October. (MFA-V)
Lauren Tivey is currently living in China where she teaches
English Literature in the American
Program. She has had poems recently appear in Message in a Bottle
Poetry Magazine, Gutter Eloquence,
Snakeskin and Word Salad, and
has three winning travel stories on
expatwomen.com. (MFA-W)
2007
Pam Ahlen has poems in Route
Seven, Bloodroot Literary Magazine,
Main Street Rag and Cider Press

22

VCFA

|

(continued)

Review. Pam organized and implemented the ﬁrst literary evening at
the Institute for Lifelong Education
at Dartmouth, a 1500 member
organization. She is currently program director for the Third Annual
Bookstock Festival of Words to be
held in Woodstock, VT, on July 30,
2011. (MFA-W)
Kelly Bennett released a new
picture book, Your Mommy Was Just
Like You, in March 2011 from G.P.
Putnam’s Sons. It is a companion
to her earlier work, Your Daddy
Was Just Like You, released in March
2010. (MFA-WCYA)
Roberta W. Coffey is a freelance
correspondent for The Boston
Globe. (MFA-W)
Christina Cook’s manuscript,
Lake Effect, was a ﬁnalist for the
Bull City Press First Book Prize
and a semiﬁnalist for the Crab
Orchard, Zone 3 and De Novo First
Book Prizes. She has poems forthcoming in ABZ and is featured in
the current issues of Interpoezia
and Hayden’s Ferry Review. Christina also had an essay published
in the Hayden’s Ferry Review blog.
(MFA-W)
Clea Felien had a solo show at
Carleton College this February/

newsletter summer 2011

March, and was a visiting artist
and guest lecturer there in April.
She was also was in a group show
at NY Studio Gallery in December.
She and her partner collaborate on
ﬁlmmaking and are part of Moyra
Davey’s ﬁlm festival and will be part
of the invitational ﬁlm festival this
summer. She was also a visiting artist at the College of Saint Benedict
& St. John’s University in the fall of
2010. (MFA-V)
Stephanie Greene’s newest
middle grade novel, Happy Birthday, Sophie Hartley, was released
from Clarion and received a starred
review in The Horn Book. (MFAWCYA)
Jennifer Wolf Kam was named
a ﬁnalist for the 2010 Katherine
Paterson Prize for Young Adult and
Children’s Writing. (MFA-WCYA)
Denise Karabinus Telang
participated in two exhibitions in
March: India from My Window at
the Watchung Arts Center with 4
self portraits alternately titled, Self
Portrait Highlighting my American
Features and Self Portrait Highlighting my Indian Features, painted
with extra sweet Indian chai and
Let’s Play Nice, curated by Diedra
Krieger at SINErgy Project Space
+ Gallery in Philadelphia. Telang
teaches drawing and printmaking at the Visual Arts Center of
NJ, Printmaking Center of NJ and
at Sumei Multidisciplinary Arts
Center. Telang serves on the Board
of Directors for the Printmaking
Center of NJ as chair of the studio
committee. She is currently organizing a VCFA Alumni Print Forum
to bring alumni together for two
days of collaborative printing and
demonstrations. (MFA-V)
Patricia McInroy gave a Creative
Process workshop in Salt Lake
City during March 2011 for visual
artists, writers and musicians. The
same month, her work appeared
in a juried faculty show at the
Art Institute of Colorado, where
she started teaching in July 2010.
In the past year, her video work
has screened at nine film festivals
including the Carnegie Museum,
Black Maria and ATA. (MFA-V)
Dana Rozier announced the May
2, 2011 release of her new book,
Natural Hawai’i: An Inquisitive Kid’s

Guide by Dot Dot Books. (MFA-W)
Rocco Scary was in two group
shows this spring: Visual Phrasing,
at the Therese A. Maloney Art
Gallery at the College of Saint
Elizabeth in Morristown, NJ, and
Beyond the Text: Artists’ Books from
the Collection of Robert J. Ruben at
the Bailey/Howe Library at the
University of Vermont Libraries,
Burlington, VT. (MFA-V)
Sherry Shahan’s latest book, a
free verse young adult novel set in
1965 Los Angeles titled Purple Daze,
was released March 2011 from Running Press Kids. (MFA-WCYA)
Jeff Daniel Silva’s latest feature
length ﬁlm Ivan & Ivana had its
world premiere at the prestigious
Visions du Réel Festival in Nyon,
Switzerland, on April 8, 2011. Shot
over ﬁve years, the ﬁlm reveals the
trials and tribulations of a war-torn
couple transplanted to San Diego,
CA, in the midst of the housing
bubble as they struggle to ride out a
series of turbulent economic, political and personal tides. (MFA-V)
Emily Wing Smith’s young adult
novel, Back When You Were Easier
to Love, was published by Dutton
Books for Young Readers on April
28, 2011. (MFA-WCYA)
Janice Wilson Stridick’s essay,
“Never Mind,” is in Arts & Letters
spring 2011 issue. Other current
publications include the poems
“Unﬁnished Daughter, III” in Philadelphia Stories, “The Artist’s House”
in Milk Money and “The Weight
of It” in Studio One. “A Portrait
Journal” was included in Keeping
Time: 150 Years of Journal Writ-

˘
˘

ton Anthology of Hint Fiction. He
recently founded Matter Press and
its Journal of Compressed Creative
Arts. (MFA-W)
Tami Lewis Brown released her
ﬁrst children’s book, Soar, Elinor!
The book features illustrations by
François Roca and was released
from Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
(MFA-WCYA)
Nathalie Dupree’s eleventh book,
Southern Biscuits, co-authored by
Cynthia Graubart, will be released
in May 2011 by Gibbs Smith Publisher. (MFA-W)
Janet Filomeno had a new exhibition in New York City this spring.
The two-person show (with Hollis
Heichemer) was at the J. CACCIOLA GALLERY in Manhattan,
and ran March 24 – April 30, 2011.
(MFA-V)
Harrison Candelaria Fletcher’s
memoir in essays, Descanso For A
Father: A Life In Fragments, has
been accepted for publication by
the University of Nebraska Press as
part of its American Lives series. It’s

ing, published by Passager Books.
She teaches at Rutgers University.
(MFA-W)
2006
Irene Abraham has shown her
work at the LA Municipal Art Gallery, LA Art Association, Orange
County Center for Contemporary
Art, the La Jolla Athenaeum and in
the William D. Cannon Art Gallery
in Carlsbad. Her work garnered an
award recently at the Ink and Clay
exhibit at California State Polytechnic University, Pomona. She shows
her work with the group ledge and
FIG, a feminist group in San Diego,
and leads an art class at a senior
center. (MFA-V)
Randall Brown has work forthcoming or appearing in Harpur
Palate, Gathering of the Tribes, Main
Street Rag, Redivider and Western
Humanities Review, among others.
Mad to Live is now available with
“bonus tracks” through PS Books.
His work also appears in The Nor-

VCFA

|

newsletter summer 2011

23

Barbara Lidforsâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;recent work deals
with private spaces that support
the values of repose, intimacy,
memories, and solitude.
24

VCFA

|

newsletter summer 2011

scheduled for release in the spring
of 2012. Harrison began the book
while he was a student at VCFA.
(MFA-W)
Kitty Forbes was awarded a fellowship by the Virginia Center for
the Creative Arts. She will be among

approximately 25 fellows focusing
on their own creative projects
at this working retreat for visual
artists, writers and composers.
(MFA-W)
Liz Gallagher’s second young
adult novel, My Not-So-Still Life, a

companion to The Opposite of Invisible, will be published in May by
Wendy Lamb Books. (MFA-WCYA)
Jennifer Gennari’s ﬁrst book, My
Mixed-Up, Berry Blue Summer, will
be published by Houghton Mifﬂin
Harcourt Children’s Books in the

VCFA

|

spring of 2012. The middle grade
novel about pie and courage was
her thesis at VCFA. (MFA-WCYA)
Jodi Hays was part of a process
group exhibition with Brooklynbased galleryELL and Spool Mfg.,
in Binghamton, NY. Jodi exhibited

newsletter summer 2011

25

Class Notes

a sculptural work, “All Together
in One Place,” in which she uses
landscape as a metaphor for racial
separation and reconciliation. Jodi
has been invited to participate
in the National Parks Artist in
Residence program for July 2011.
(MFA-V)
Shelley Spence Kiernan is a participant in the Bo Robinson Education and Training program, and
coordinator of a Crossing Borders
With Literature workshop at Classic
Books through People & Stories/
Gente y Cuentos. Her poems appear
in Issues 10/11 of Ars Interpres:
An International Journal of Poetry,
Translation, & Art and in Eating
Her Wedding Dress: A Collection of
Clothing Poems. (MFA-W)
Nate Liederbach released a
co-edited anthology through Lost
Horse Press. Of a Monstrous Child:
An Anthology of Creative Writing
Relationships features contributors
such as Robin Hemley, Contessa
Riggs, Ryan Boudinot and Rick
Moody. The focus of the collection
is not on its contributors’ individual
pieces, but the relationships between its authors. Currently, Nate
Liederbach is a Ph.D. candidate
in Creative Writing and English
Literature at the University of Utah.
(MFA-W)
Janet Mendelsohn’s book,

26

VCFA

|

(continued)

Maine’s Museums: Art, Oddities &
Artifacts, will be released in June
from The Countryman Press, a
division of WW Norton, and is
the ﬁrst book devoted solely to
the state’s art, history, maritime,
children’s and unusual museums.
Along with in-depth features are interviews with the Maine Arts Commission director, State Historian,
and a painter on the NEA’s National
Council for the Arts. (MFA-W)
Kerry Muir’s full-length play,
“Cut-Ups,” recently won the Maxim
Mazumdar New Play award – it
had a production at the Alleyway
Theatre in Buffalo, NY, this past
February. (MFA-W)
Randall Nelson is Adjunct
Faculty of Art at Quinebaug Valley
Community College in Willimantic,
CT, teaching Intro to Studio Art.
He had a one-person show at the
QVCC main campus gallery in
Danielson, CT, in January, and has a
piece in the upcoming Local Artists
show at Eastern CT State University.
The piece is entitled “Treated to
Rejection,” is in four sections and
deals with the generic language of
rejection letters. (MFA-V)
Robin Oliveira’s novel My Name
is Mary Sutter was chosen this year
as an all-city read for both Roswell,
GA, and Schenectady, NY. The book
recently received an Honorable

newsletter summer 2011

Mention from the Langham Prize
for Historical Fiction, was listed
on the 2011 Amelia Bloomer List
and was chosen by Amazon UK
as a Rising Star and as the Costco
Book Buyers Pick for April 2011.
(MFA-W)
Matt Page, VCFA alum and
Time-Based Media Coordinator,
has just released his new CD as a
free download at noisetrade.com/
dtes. Lost and Gone Forever, is a
narrative, rock album about coal
mining in Appalachia, KY, written
by Dream the Electric Sleep. The
download goes straight to iTunes
and includes song lyrics and album
art. (MFA-V)
Hilary Poremski-Beitzel has
been awarded a four-week writing
fellowship at the Vermont Studio
Center in Johnson, VT, to take
place in July of this year. This is a
“creative revitalization” fellowship for teacher-writers through
the Learning in Art and Culture
Program. She is a full-time English
teacher at Rutland High School in
Rutland, VT. (MFA-W)
Mary Jo Wyse’s essay, “To Have
and To Hold,” will be published
in Chicken Soup for the Soul: New
Moms, which is scheduled to hit
shelves in March. It is her third essay in the best-selling Chicken Soup
for the Soul series. (MFA-W)
2005
Brad Birchett had a solo exhibition this past February of interme-

dia installations titled Earth and
Time at The Myers Gallery at the
University of Tulsa. His art pieces
include documentation, sound,
drawings, objects, multiples, bioart, collections, interventions and
installations. He will also be part of
two-person exhibition at Prescott
College Art Gallery in Prescott, AZ,
in the fall of 2011. (MFA-V)
Bridget Birdsall has been
awarded the Marg Chandler Memorial Fellowship for A Room of Her
Own’s bi-annual retreat for women
writers at the Ghost Mountain
Guest Ranch in Abiquiu, NM, from
August 8 – 14, 2011. She recently
released a young adult novel titled
Ordinary Angels, about siblings
surviving the death of a sibling.
Her visual art was on exhibit at the
Willy Street Co-op from April 1 –
May 31, 2011. (MFA-WCYA)
Debby Dahl Edwardson’s
ﬁrst young adult novel, Blessing’s
Bead (Farrar, Straus and Giroux),
has been named to the ALA/
YALSA Best Books for Young
Adults 2011 list. It was featured on
the cover of Booklist in October
2010, and was named to Booklist’s
Top 10 First Novels for Youth in
2010, IRA’s Notable Books for a
Global Society and was a 2010
Junior Library Guild Selection.
Her next young adult novel, My
Name is Not Easy, will be released
by Marshell Cavendish in October
2011. (MFA-WCYA)
Gustavo Godoy had a new solo
exhibition at the Wexner Center for
the Arts at Ohio State University.
The show, which opened on November 9 and ran through February
13, 2011, was titled Fast-formal
Object: Flayed White. (MFA-V)
Margarite (Howe) Landry’s
short story, “Panic,” recently appeared in Nimrod. Her story “Soap”
is forthcoming in Tampa Review.
(MFA-W)
Helen W. Mallon’s short story,
“Did You Put the Cat to Bed,” is
available for download to computer
or e-reader from Bookstogonow.
com. She reviews books for the
Philadelphia Inquirer and ﬁctionwritersreview.com. She teaches at
Cheltenham Adult School and has a
private editing business. (MFA-W)
Hatsy McGraw has a poem,

“Monday Lunch at Skippers,” in
the 2011 issue of Bloodroot Literary
Magazine. (MFA-WCYA)
Matthew Propst’s books Savannah Cemeteries and Savannah
Perspectives are now available.
Savannah Wide is his third book of
photography featuring panoramic
images of Savannah, GA. (MFA-V)
Sarah Sullivan’s fourth picture

exhibition and performance at the
SOHO20 Gallery Chelsea in NYC.
The show ran through March 26,
2011, and is titled Writ Small – an
exhibition and performance series
whose roots and intention are
derived from painting. Bisbing
constructs intimate collages with
hand-painted paper. (MFA-V)
Sundee Frazier’s novel, The

book, Passing the Music Down,
inspired by the lives of old-time
musicians Melvin Wine and Jake
Krack and illustrated by Barry Root,
will be published by Candlewick
Press in May 2011. Sarah was a
presenter at the Southern Kentucky
Book Fest in Bowling Green in
April 2011. (MFA-WCYA)
Mary Ting will have an installation in the Soﬁa International Paper
Art Biennial 2011, at the National
Art Gallery in Soﬁa, Bulgaria
on view May/June 2011; a video
piece in the ArtStays 9 Festival of
Contemporary Art, in Ptuj, Slovenia,
in July/August 2011; and a print in
the Sanbao International Printmaking Biennial 2011 exhibition tour in
China this summer. (MFA-V)

Other Half of My Heart, was listed
in Kirkus Reviews Best Children’s
Books 2010 and the Cooperative
Children’s Book Center’s Choices
2011. It was also nominated to the
Notable Books discussion list for
the 2011 American Librarian Association’s mid-winter convention.
Paperback and audio versions will
be released in June 2011. (MFAWCYA)
Alex Rheault had a solo exhibition of large drawings titled The
Erotics of the Transforming Body at
Art House in Maine. She also participated in the Cambridge Arts
Council’s Drawing in Public, and
showed a written visual work in
Story Tellers at USM. Artistic. Alex
is also the Director of Quimby
Colony’s AIR program in Fashion
Costume & Textile Arts and she curated fellow VCFA alumnae Lucinda
Bliss and Susan Newbold in a fall
UMA drawing exhibit. (MFA-V)
Wendy Townsend’s second novel
The Sundown Rule, was published
by namelos. She is presently work-

Class Notes
ing on a third novel, about the blue
iguana murders that took place on
Grand Cayman Island, at the Blue
Iguana Recovery Program. Wendy
is also on the faculty at the Writing
Institute at Sarah Lawrence College.
(MFA-WCYA)
Barbara Yontz hosted a panel at
the Foundations in Art and Theory
Education conference in St. Louis
in early April. The panel was titled,
“Solid Ground or Shifting Sands:
Foundations in Art and Technology.” Her sound piece, You are There,
Like my Skin, was selected by the
juror for inclusion in the exhibition
at MAD Art Gallery in St. Louis in
conjunction with the conference.
(MFA-V)
Debra Gordon Zaslow’s story,
“Diving for Love,” is in the 2010 anthology Cup of Comfort for Couples.
An excerpt from her memoir
Bringing Bubbe Home is in the 2010
edition of Drash Northwest Mosaic,
a Jewish literary journal. (MFA-W)
2003
Lyssa Tall Anolik won an honorable mention in the 2010 Earth
Vision Nature Writing Competition
for her essay, “Breaking and Entering”. She also had three poems,
“Animals,” “Clay Beads” and
“Evergreen” published in Issue 5 of
EarthSpeak Magazine. (MFA-W)
Kim Aubrey is an editor at Red
Claw Press, a small press publishing
its ﬁrst anthology, Crave It: Writers
and Artists Do Food, in the spring
of 2011. For more information
and to read the online supplement
with work from VCFA alumni and
others, visit redclawpress.com.
(MFA-W)
Nickole Brown has accepted a
tenure-track poetry position at the
University of Arkansas, Little Rock.
(MFA-W)
Patricia Denys had a photograph
accepted in the 6th Annual Small
Works Show at the 440 Gallery in
Brooklyn, NY. It ran December
2, 2010 – January 9, 2011. She
presented a paper at the School of
Visual Arts 24th Annual National
Conference on Liberal Arts and the
Education of Artists in October
2010. The paper was titled, “Green
Oceans, Green Caves, and Green

28

VCFA

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(continued)

Nests,” and was published in the
Conference Proceedings in January
2011. Her paper, “Animals and
Women as Meat,” was published in
The Brock Review. (MFA-V)
Debra Edgerton received a
research grant to study at Kansai
University in Japan. She will be
spending seven weeks this May and
June 2011 studying visual storytelling in Osaka, Kyoto and Nara.
(MFA-V)
Joan Grubin had two solo exhibitions this March and April. The ﬁrst,
a show in Cranford, NJ, was titled
Joan Grubin: Propositions in Paper, at
the Tomasulo Art Gallery at Union
County College and ran through
April 16, 2011. The second was titled
Scissor / Paper / Light: and it ran
through March 18, 2011 at the University of Maine at Orono. (MFA-V)
Meredith Davies Hadaway’s
joined several fellow alumni for an
off-site “Word Girls” reading during
the AWP conference in Washington, DC. Hadaway is the recipient
of a Maryland State Arts Council
Individual Artist Award for 2011. In
addition, her poem “Drift,” received
an honorable mention award from

newsletter summer 2011

New Millennium Writings and will
appear in their 2011 anthology.
Also, her poem, “Waiting for You in
the Lobby Bar” received a Pushcart
nomination in 2010. (MFA-W)
Sarah Lamstein’s picture book
Big Night for Salamanders, illustrated by Carol Benioff, was named
a 2010 Smithsonian Notable Book
for Children. (MFA-WCYA)
Dawn McDufﬁe’s chapbook,
Bulky Pick Up Day, will be published this summer by Finishing
Line Press. (MFA-W)
Gabriella Mirollo was selected as
Featured Photographer for March
by Cameras Inc. She regularly posts
words and images on her blog,
twotigerscreations.blogspot.com,
and is showing her works during
the Somerville Open Studios weekend as a resident of Vernon Street
Studios. (MFA-W)
Micaela Myers is now the editor
of Laguna Beach Magazine and
Bespoke Magazine. She is also
volunteering as a senior editor for
StubbyDog.com, a nonproﬁt dedicated to helping change perceptions
about pit bulls. (MFA-W)
Linda Stillman had several works

from her Found series included in
the exhibition, Hidden Cities, at the
New Century Artists Gallery in New
York City. The show was sponsored
by the Women’s Caucus for Art and
curated by Lisa Phillips, Director
of the New Museum. It ran from
February 1 – 12, 2011. (MFA-V)
2002
Monica Berlin’s essay, “Your Slow
Pulse,” was published in the fall
2010 issue of Third Coast, as part
of its Symposium on Writing and
the Midwest. Berlin also read at
the 15th Anniversary celebration
of Third Coast in November at the
Kalamazoo Book Arts Center. Her
essay, “The Eighteenth Week,” was
published in the winter/spring 2010
Passages North, and another essay,
“When the painter arrives the day
before,” was published in a recent
issue of Memoir (and). Her poem
“What a year looks like: drenched...”
was published in the spring 2010
Third Coast. (MFA-W)
Dellana Diovisalvo had a poem
published in the winter 2011 issue
of Calyx: A Journal of Art and
Literature by Women. She is currently working on her ﬁrst novel.
(MFA-W)
Christine Reynolds returned to
Massachusetts this past fall after
spending six years on the West
Coast. She is now very happily
settled in Western Massachusetts
and glad to be back in New England, although the past winter was a
real adjustment. (MFA-V)
Michael Scoﬁeld was the Visiting
Poet at New Mexico Tech in Socorro in April. He read from his two
books of poems, Silicon Valley Escapee (Amador Press) and Whirling
Backward into the World (Sunstone
Press), plus from an upcoming collection from Sunstone, Bewildered.
Sunstone has published two novels
in his Santa Fe Trilogy, Acting Badly
and Making Crazy. (MFA-W)
2001
Charles Borges Accardi did
the cover art for two recent books:
Injuring Eternity (World Nouveau
Press) and Woman on a Shaky
Bridge (Finishing Line Press), both

Maggie Kast will have an excerpt
from her novel in progress, Starting
at the End, published online in the
spring of 2011 in Red Claw Press’s
anthology of food and drink,
Crave It, edited by VCFA alum Kim
Aubrey and others. She read from
the novel in March as part of the
Tuesday Funk reading series in
Chicago. (MFA-W)
Barbara Lidfors had an exhibition in Fürth, Germany, titled
Public and Private Spaces. (MFA-V)
Ada Jill Schneider’s poem,
“Heirloom,” appears in Child of
My Child: Poems and Stories for
Grandparents published by GellesCole Literary Enterprises in 2010.
Her poem, “Flight After Flight,” can
be found in the March 2011 online
issue of Persimmon Tree Magazine. (MFA-W)

volumes of poetry written by Millicent Borges Accardi. (MFA-V)
Sabrina Fadial became the new
Assistant Director of the Visual Art
Program at VCFA this past October.
In March 2011, she had an exhibit
with her father, a painter, at Queens
University. The Father-Daughter
Show was at Queens University’s
Max L. Jackson Gallery in the
Watkins Building in Charlotte, NC.
This spring she begins work on a
commission for an outdoor piece
at the Brevard Music Center in
Brevard, NC. (MFA-V)
Evan Fallenberg has been appointed director of ﬁction for the
Shaindy Rudoff Graduate Program
in Creative Writing at Bar-Ilan University of Israel, starting in the fall
of 2011. He recently won an award
from the Times Literary Supplement of London for his translation
of Ron Leshem’s Beaufort. His new
novel, When We Danced on Water,
will be published by HarperCollins
in May 2011. (MFA-W)

VCFA

2000
Linda Aldrich had her full collection of poems, March and Mad

|

newsletter summer 2011

29

Class Notes
Women, accepted for publication
in August 2012 by Cherry Grove
Collections (Word Tech Communications). (MFA-W)
Judy O. Haselhoef continues
her conceptually-based community
art practice through the economic
development foundation she began
in Haiti in 2007. Yonn Ede Lot: One
Helping Another funds projects
initiated and sustained by peasant
groups in rural Haiti. Summer
camp will feature collaborative
interactions by American and Haitian artists, educators and students.
(MFA-V)
LeAnne Howe is a 2010/11
Fulbright Scholar living in Amman,
Jordan, through June. On January
26, 2011, she gave the Richard
Hoggart Lecture for Goldsmiths
University of London, UK. On
March 5, 2011, she received the
Tulsa Library Trust’s “American Indian Author Award,” at the Central
Library in Tulsa. In June, Howe will
be a presenting faculty at the 2011
Kachemak Bay Writers’ Conference
in Homer, AK. She is working on a

30

VCFA

|

(continued)

third novel and is currently a professor at the University of Illinois.
(MFA-W)
Lory Lockwood had a new show
open at the Reynolds Ryan Art Gallery at the Isidore Newman School
in New Orleans. The exhibition,
titled The Art of Reﬂection, opened
on February 10 and ran through
March 3, 2011. (MFA-V)
Susan Newbold had a solo show
at Art Place Gallery in Fairﬁeld, CT,
titled Fragments, which included
drawings, prints and paintings.
It ran from March 1 – 26, 2011.
(MFA-V)
April Pulley Sayre’s ﬁction
picture book, If You’re Hoppy
(Greenwillow), released in February
2011, was embraced by the School
Library Journal which said it was
“sure to be a story time staple, with
many repeat performances.” (MFAWCYA)
Gretchen Woelﬂe announced the
publication of her ﬁrst novel—
a middle grade book, with illustrations by Thomas Cox, set in Shakespeare’s London, All the World’s A

newsletter summer 2011

Stage: A Novel in Five Acts (Holiday
House). She and fellow alumna
Carolyn Marsden (2000) traveled
to West Africa – Mali, Burkina Faso
and Senegal – to give author talks at
three international schools. (MFAWCYA)
1999
Dory Adams’ creative nonﬁction essay, “Viewing Stories: From
Warrior’s Mark to Arlington,” was
published at Connotation Press: An
Online Artifact in January 2011. She
would like to thank fellow VCFA
writers Ann Giroux and Sue Allison
for their encouragement and critique of this piece. (MFA-W)
Sue Allison has a piece in the fall
Harvard Review, “Dream Work,”
and in the 2011 winter issue of Antioch Review, “Made To Measure.”
(MFA-W)
Ann Angel received the 2011
YALSA Excellence in Nonﬁction
Award from the American Library
Association for her biography, Janis
Joplin: Rise Up Singing. Her essay
about capturing the teen narrative
appeared on Hunger Mountain.
Angel and her daughter Amanda
Angel, an adoptee and birth parent,
also co-edited a collection of essays
addressed to birth parents: Silent
Embrace, Perspectives on Birth and
Adoption. (MFA-WCYA)
Marcia Arrieta’s book of poetry
triskelion, tiger moth, tangram,
thyme was released in March 2011
from Otoliths. Her chapbook the
curve against the linear appears in
An Uncommon Accord (toadlily
press). She continues to publish
Indeﬁnite Space, a poetry journal
(indeﬁnitespace.net). (MFA-W)
Bruce Black’s debut book,
Writing Yoga: A Guide to Keeping
a Practice Journal was released in
April 2011 from Rodmell Press.
The book is part memoir, part
instruction, and explores the links
between yoga, writing and life.
(MFA-WCYA)
Lucinda Bliss’s work was part
of Above and Below the Line, the
title of the Maine Drawing Project
Exhibit which ran from March 26 –
April 29, 2011 at Fryeburg Academy
in Fryeburg, ME. (MFA-V)
Alexandra Broches’ photograph,

“Virginia Beach (wrapped palms),”
was accepted into Photo Spiva
2011, at the Spiva Center for the
Arts in MO, from March 5 – April
24, 2011. She also had three pieces
in the exhibition We Talk About
Architecture, Architecture Talks Back
at the Knight Campus Art Gallery
of the Community College of
Rhode Island, from April 5 – April
27, 2011. She collaborated with the
poet Lisa Starr for two pieces for
Ekphrasis, Art into Poetry, Poetry
into Art at Hera Gallery in Wakeﬁeld, RI. (MFA-V)
Gladys Goldberg had two poems
in The New Renaissance, and another forthcoming in U.S.1 Worksheets in April. Her poem “Horses”
was accepted by the Bryant Literary
Review. (MFA-W)
Lynn Imperatore is chair of the
Postgraduate Associates of the university research center Advanced
Centre in Drawing. Lynn’s work
is included in exhibitions: Space,
Place, & Spectral Trace Exhibition (in conjunction with the
PLaCE / Mapping Spectral Traces
Workshop) in March 2011, and
two Works-in-Progress shows with
some members of her UWE/Ph.D.
cohort in April and May 2011.
(MFA-V)
Patricia Lee Lewis is leading creative writing and yoga for women
near Valencia, Spain, in the mountains and on the Mediterranean,
June 13 – 20, 2011. (MFA-W)
Kevin McLellan has poems
forthcoming in: Badlands, Horse
Less Review, inter/rupture, Poetry
East, and the anthologies Like a Fat
Gold Watch and Preparing the Face:
Poems About Shaving. He has recent
poems in Diagram and Muse &
Stone. (MFA-W)
Josh Wilker’s memoir Cardboard
Gods was released in paperback by
Algonquin Books on March 15,
2011, and the rights to the book
were purchased by Michael Eisner’s

Tornante Co., to be produced into a
half-hour single-camera television
comedy. (MFA-W)
1998
Pete Driessen is in the process
of developing a new home-based
garage gallery called TuckUnder. He
recently had a solo show at They
Won’t Find Us Here Gallery in Minneapolis, MN. Pete’s work is in a
group show Inside Out/Self Portraits
at Hennes Art, also in Minneapolis.
(MFA-V)
Erica Fielder’s company creates
interpretive panels for parks and
preserves around the US and now
overseas. She works with clients on
themes, and then makes art and text
that convey information on habitat,
speciﬁc plants and animals, and
how to care for a natural or cultural
site. (MFA-V)
Bruce Laird had a one-person
show at NOHO gallery in Chelsea.
It ran from March 19 – April
9, 2011. The work in the show
explores the grid in a series of
paintings involving his interest
in shadows and negative spaces.
(MFA-V)
Meridith McNeal’s work was
part of Italiana at St. Joseph’s College Gallery in Brooklyn, NY, in
March 2011. Her work was shown
in Topology of Dream Time, at the
HAC Gallery in Kobe City, Japan.
In addition, Meridith was awarded
her third Visiting Artists residency
at the American Academy in Rome
in 2010, and was Artslant 1st 2011
Showcase Winner in Sculpture
and Artslant 6th 2010 Showcase
Winner in Drawing. Meridith was
thrilled to be honored as Hooper of
the Month, Artwork featured and
award, hoopnotica.com, February
2011. (MFA-V)
Barbara Rockman’s new collection of poems, Sting and Nest,
was released from Sunstone Press.

VCFA

|

David Wojahn says, “Barbara
Rockman writes a deft sort of lyric
that is compressed, compassionate
and unsentimental. Her subject is
the ebb and ﬂow of domestic life,
but there is nothing familiar or
conventional about her approach.”
(MFA-W)
1997
Bethany Bonner had an April show
at Norwich Arts Council Gallery in
Norwich, CT, a solar exhibit of recent
prints and drawings derived from the
seminal image of the spiral, exploring
the essence of ﬂight, movement and
energy. (MFA-V)
Daniel M. Jaffe’s novel, The
Limits of Pleasure, has just been
re-published by Lethe Press. Dan’s
novel was a Finalist for a ForeWord
Magazine Book of the Year Award
when ﬁrst published in 2001. Dan
began working on the novel while
studying at VCFA. (MFA-W)
Verbena Pastor began a UK tour
for the US edition of Lumen and
has contracted with Italian publisher Sellerio, for her new book, Master
of One Hundred Bones. (MFA-W)
Vincent Zandri’s new thrillers,
Moonlight Rises and The Concrete Pearl, are forthcoming from
StoneGate Ink. A freelance foreign
correspondent for RT and other
global news networks, he divides his
time between New York and Italy.
(MFA-W)
1996
Susan Spencer Crowe moved to
Kingston, NY, in 2005 after nearly
40 years of living in New York City.
She has taken up making sculpture
out of cardboard and covering it
with brightly colored encaustic wax
paint, often adding chenille stems
to the mix of materials. In addition,
she teaches studio art classes at
Queens College. In the fall, she will

newsletter summer 2011

31

Class Notes
be teaching a new course at Queens
College, entitled “Contemporary
Art in a Global Society,” that was
originally designed by Gregory
Sholette. (MFA-V)
Paula Goldman has poems
forthcoming in Cream City Review,
Comstock Review, Quills & Parchment and Slant. Her recent work
appeared in Briar Cliff Review, Slant
and ellipsis. Late Inamorato, the
manuscript, was a semi-ﬁnalist for
the Brittingham and Pollack Poetry
Prize at University of Wisconsin,
Madison. (MFA-W)
Dawn Reno Langley recently
received her Ph.D. in Interdisciplinary Studies/Humanities and
Culture from the Union Institute
and University in 2010. In addition,
she was awarded the designation
“Senior Specialist” in the area of
Creative Leadership by the Fulbright Program. Langley traveled to
Islamabad, Pakistan, for two weeks
where she acted as consultant and
lecturer to several Pakistani universities, as well as members of the U.S.
Embassy. (MFA-W)

(continued)

poems, Fargo, 1957: An Elegy, was
published in December by the
Institute for Regional Studies at
North Dakota State University. The
book chronicles the June 20, 1957
tornado that struck Fargo, ND, killing twelve people, including two of
her distant relatives. The book also
includes never-before published
photos. (MFA-W)
Spencer Smith published her
novel Depth-of-Field through the
CreateSpace platform on Amazon.
com. It will be out by late spring in
both paperback and Kindle formats.
During her last semester at VCFA,
she worked on stories that have
been incorporated into the novel.
(MFA-W)
John Solaperto is currently the
VCFA media coordinator for all
three program residencies. In addition, he received a degree from
Linda Montano in June 2010, and
is now recognized as a performance
saint – his most recent performance
being the recessional at the February 2011 residency. (MFA-V)

they are also doing three large craft
events, one in New York, an installation of 30 paper “cocoons” at Kissini
Gallery in Montreal and preparing
for a spread in a forthcoming book
called Papercraft 2. Riki also received
a development grant from VAC to
video her room size “paper forest”
installation. This summer she will
be at the Vermont Studio Center as a
writer. (MFA-V)
Nick Papandreou had essays in
Kenyon Review Online, Threepenny
Review, the electronic version of
Iowa Review and the April issue of
POETRY included his translation
of ten Greek rhyming couplets. In
addition, he wrote the script for a
movie My First Baptism, and just
completed another script based on
the life of Greek composer Mikis
Theodorakis. Nick will be joining
a workshop on the island of Lesvos
in May. His most recent book is a
collection of short stories in Greek,
titled Love, Edited. (MFA-W)

1993

Susan Aizenberg has a new poem,
“Collaborations,” on H. L. Hix’s
IN QUIRE website, and has been
nominated for this year’s Pushcart
Prize anthology. She read recently
in the Nebraska Arts Council’s
reading series devoted to past and
current NAC Fellowship recipients.
(MFA-W)
Moira Linehan had residencies in
2010 at the Virginia Center for the
Creative Arts, the Whiteley Center
at the University of Washington’s
Friday Harbor Labs and the Tyrone
Guthrie Centre in Ireland. Recent
work appeared or is forthcoming
in America, The Greensboro Review,
The Journal of Medical Humanities,
Notre Dame Review, Poetry East,
Tidal Basin Review and Wild Apples.
(MFA-W)
Jo-Ann Mapson’s tenth novel,
Solomon’s Oak (Bloomsbury), won
the 2011 American Library Association’s RUSA award in the genre of
Women’s Fiction. Sold to China,
Taiwan and Poland, Solomon’s Oak
will be published in paperback in
the UK this spring. Her next novel,
Miracle of Miracles, will be published
by Bloomsbury in 2012. (MFA-W)
Philip Tate won ﬁrst prize in the

1995
Brad Davis conducted two workshops—“9/11: Art & the Burden
of History” and “Great Authors at
the Manor”—at Sylvester Manor
Educational Farm. Two of his
poems were accepted at Image,
he was invited to judge a national
chapbook competition and a Connecticut institution approached
him to brainstorm the launch of
a new journal. He was also one of
six ﬁnalists for the 2011 Frost Place
summer residency. (MFA-W)
Eugenie Doyle’s second novel,
According to Kit, (Frontstreet/BoydsMills Press) was named a 2010
Honor Book by Society of School
Librarians International. Eugenie
recently completed a residency at
the Vermont Studio Center. She will
be the keynote speaker at the New
England Young Writers’ Conference
at Breadloaf in May. (MFA-W)
April Ossmann’s essay, “Thinking
Like an Editor: How to Order Your
Poetry Manuscript,” appeared in the
March/April 2011 issue of Poets &
Writers. (MFA-W)
Jamie Parsley’s tenth book of

32

VCFA

|

Paul Calter’s steel and marble
sculpture Mandala II was unveiled
and dedicated on October 2, 2010,
at Castleton State College in VT.
Mandala II was created at the Carving Studio and Sculpture Center in
West Rutland during the 1991 VT
Bicentennial Sculpture Symposium,
and has been on exhibit at the
studio. (MFA-V)
Willard Cook has been publishing the biannual Epiphany for
eight years. Derek Walcott, Elena
Ferrante, Nell Freudenberger, Siri
Husvedt, April Benard, Cynthia
Zarin, David Updike, Kaylie Jones
and still 60 percent comes from
the slush pile. The last issue was
nominated to Pushcart and BASS.
(MFA-W)
Nan Hass Feldman is in the
middle of a commission to paint
ﬁve large paintings for the new Pediatric Wing of Cape Cod Hospital
in Hyannis, MA. (MFA-V)
Riki Moss and her partner Robert
Ostermeyer will have a lighting
piece at the Shelburne Museum’s
Paperwork in 3-D show from May
15 – October 15, 2011. In addition,

newsletter summer 2011

1992

6th Annual Black Warrior Review
Fiction Contest for his short story
titled “Dam.” (MFA-W)
1991
Liz Abrams-Morley’s second
full-length poetry collection, Necessary Turns, was published by Word
Press/Word Tech Communications
in 2010, and received an Eric Hoffer
Poetry Award for Excellence in Small
Press Publishing. Her short story,
“Mitzraim Means Tight Spaces,”
was ﬁrst published in the anthology,
Literary Mama, and was performed
by InterAct Theatre Company in
Philadelphia. (MFA-W)
Robin Greene’s historical
novel Augustus: Narrative of a Slave
Woman was released in April 2011.
The novel deals with issues of black
feminism, race-speciﬁc reactions
to historical inquiry, sexuality,
rape and the quest for identity.
(MFA-W)
Tracy Robert’s novella excerpt, “The Curse of Ambrosia,” appears in the anthology, When Last
on the Mountain (Holy Cow! Press,
2010). (MFA-W)
Sara Kay Rupnik and her fellow alumae, Tracy Robert (‘91)
and Liz Abrams-Morley (‘91)
have returned from conducting
their Around the Block Writing
Workshop in lovely Treasure Beach,
Jamaica. Sara’s story, “A Study of
Light” is in the spring issue of Persimmon Tree Magazine. (MFA-W)
David-Glen Smith had a poem
in the online magazine, Saltwater
Quarterly, for their premiere issue
this past January. Recently, he had
poems published in the anthology Ganymede-Unﬁnished, Houston
Literary Review (three issues in
2010), Lady Jane Miscellany, Slant
and The Write Room. Most importantly, David and his partner Ricky
welcomed a baby boy into their
lives on December 3, 2010, Brendan
Seda-Smith. (MFA-W)
Bill Walsh recently published his
ﬁfth book, David Bottoms: Critical
Essays and Interviews (McFarland). Recent and new work has appeared in The Owen Wister Review,
The Southern Poetry Anthology, The
Flannery O’Connor Review, and elsewhere. Currently pursuing a Ph.D.

in Creative Writing at Georgia State
University, he has lectures and workshops this spring at LaGrange College and at the Flannery O’Connor
Conference. (MFA-W)

issue of Epiphany Magazine and a
humorous novella “I Like a Little
Bit of the Handsome Americans
Myself ” was in WritingRaw.
(MFA-W)

1990

1989

Diann Blakely was a nominee for
Georgia Poet of the Year. She has
had pieces in the Asheville Poetry
Review, Gettysburg Review, Gently
Read Literature, Main Street Rag and
Prairie Schooner. Individual poems
from her collection Rain in our Door
are in the current issues of Parnassus
and Southern Humanities Review.
Blakely continues to toil away at a
massive undertaking on Swampland,
a regional website devoted to Southern culture. (MFA-W)
Richard Lutman’s long narrative
poem, “When I Moved the Earth,”
will be published in late spring or
early summer as a chapbook by The
Last Automat Press. In addition, his
short story “Heroes” was in a recent

Sue Cowing’s middle-grade
novel, You Will Call Me Drog will be
out in September 2011 from Carolrhoda Books, with a book launch
on September 3, 2011 at Barnes &
Noble in Honolulu. (MFA-W)
Tam LIn Neville’s second book of
poems, Triage, came out this past
September from Cervená Barva
Press. (MFA-W)
Joan Seliger Sidney’s poem,
“Conundrum,” appeared in Long
River Run. (MFA-W, Post-Grad
semester in MFA-WCYA, 2008)

VCFA

|

1988
Nancy Lord has a new book, Early
Warming: Crisis and Response in the

newsletter summer 2011

33

Class Notes

(continued)

entitled Falling Sideways, (Bloomsburg) and a collection, The Girl
with Red Hair, (Serving House
Books) coming out in February 2011. New essays, stories and
translations appear in Ecotone, The
Literary Review and Absinthe: New
European Writing. He will be on a
national tour to support the books
this spring. (MFA-W)
1983

Climate-Changed North, published
in 2011 by Counterpoint Press.
(MFA-W)
Sarah Van Arsdale has placed
her third novel, Grand Isle, with
SUNY Press, and it will be out
next spring. In the past two years,
despairing of ever seeing her ﬁction
in print again, she took up making
short animated ﬁlms from her own
watercolor drawings, one of which,
Dinner Date, was shown in the
Atlanta Shorts Festival in the summer of 2011. Now she’s working
on another book, but is continuing
to work on other short ﬁlms, just
in case. She also writes for Fiction
Writers’ Review. (MFA-W)
1986
Mark Konkel’s novel, Disaster
Park, is being published by Blue
Leaf Publications. It’s a science ﬁction novel set 60 years in the future,
and is his second novel. (MFA-W)
1985
Dennis F. Bormann’s novella,
Airboat, published by Main Street
Rag, will be released in June 2011.
In the fall issue of their magazine, his story “Fish Hawk” was
also published. Along with fellow
VCFA in Writing grad, Steve Taylor
(1984), he is editing a short ﬁction
anthology based on the theme of
sports, which is also forthcoming in
the summer from Main Street Rag.
(MFA-W)
Thomas E. Kennedy has a
novel coming out in March 2011

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Elinor Benedict has a poem, “Early Girl,” in a new annual anthology
called The New Guard, along with
many well-known and new poets,
and was edited by Shanna Miller
McNair. (MFA-W)
Deborah DeNicola’s new collection of poetry, Original Human,
was released in December from
WordTech Communications. She
has poems in Nimrod’s Award issue
where she was a ﬁnalist for the
Pablo Neruda Prize, and poems
forthcoming in Carpe Articulum.
Deborah’s work recently appeared
in Up Channel, Lunarosity Online,
Melusine Online and Umbrella Online. Her memoir, The Future That
Brought Her Here, hit #1 in psychology on Amazon last September
when it came out. (MFA-W)
Nadell Fishman’s second collection of poems, At Work In The
Bridal Industry, will be released
this year from Plain View Press.
(MFA-W)
Suzanne Levine’s poetry collection titled Haberdasher’s Daughter is
a ﬁnalist for the Eric Hoffer Award,
and the book cover art is a ﬁnalist
for the da Vinci Eye. (MFA-W)
Pam Lewis (formerly Pam Casey)
has a new novel coming out from
Simon & Schuster this summer
titled, A Young Wife, inspired by the
events of her grandmother’s life.
(MFA-W)
Valerie Wohlfeld has poems in
JAMA, Cincinnati Review, The Healing Muse, Verse Wisconsin and Sugar
House Review. (MFA-W)
Paula Yup’s poem, “Somehow
Sorrow,” will appear in a future issue of Trajectory, and another, titled
“My Morning Walk,” in Poiesis.
(MFA-W)

newsletter summer 2011

1981
Richard Michelson’s children’s
book Busing Brewster (Knopf) was
named a New York Times 10 Best
Illustrated Books of 2010, and one
of 8 Notable Books of 2010. It was
also the only book to make both
New York Times year-end lists. In
addition, his poetry has appeared in
the Harvard Review. (MFA-W)

Faculty Notes
Graphic Design
Ziddi Msangi is on sabbatical
from the University of Massachusetts, Dartmouth. He will be working on a series of broadside posters
titled “Liberation and Independence – Retracing the Narratives
That Form Identity,” and also plans
to travel abroad.
Bethany Koby’s new business, Technology Will Save Us,
was featured in Wired UK. She
has also been invited to speak at
TEDxKids@Brussels.
Yoon Soo Lee’s paper, “The
Effect of Prototyping and Critical
Feedback on Fixation in Engineering Design” (co-authored by Katja
Hölttä-Otto and Trina Kershaw),
was accepted as a poster presentation at CogSci 2011 in Boston.
In conjunction with a NSF grant
this paper proposes to study how
creativity and innovation can be
taught to students of Mechanical
Engineering. Lee also has a oneperson show scheduled for summer
of 2011 at Farm Project Space +
Gallery in Wellﬂeet, MA.

Music
Composition
Andy Jaffe’s book Something Borrowed, Something Blue: Principles of
Jazz Composition, will be published
by Advance Publishing later this
year.
Michael Early performed “glitterweeks” and “honig mond” during
the ‘Tutti’ New Music Festival at
Denison University in Granville,
OH. He also played electric guitar
with violinist Angela Early as part
of the new music duo X10.
Rick Baitz’s complete “Chthonic
Dances” was premiered by the
string quartet ETHEL at the Tribeca
New Music Festival at Merkin
Concert Hall on May 23rd.
Don DiNicola is the producer
of 2 CDs for Albany Records: The
Chamber Works of Paul Chihara and
Chamber Works of Carl Volrath. He
is Composing music for the History
Channel’s Swamp People and for the
Indie ﬁlm, Don’t Look Away.

Visitors in Ulrike Mueller’s exhibition Fever 103, Franza, and Quilts at the
Cairo Biennial in Egypt, December 2010.

of Mira Schor’s recent exhibition
titled “Paintings From the Nineties
to Now” will be in the art journal
X-TRA.
Ulrike Müller’s work combines
activist concerns with a critical investigation of modernism’s
formalism visual vocabularies.
Müller, a New York-based artist,
will present a new group of enamel
paintings and three large-format
quilts based on Ingeborg Bachmann’s unﬁnished novel, The Book
of Franza, at the 12th International
Cairo Biennale. She is also the coeditor of the gender queer feminist
art journal LTTR.
Faith Wilding is retiring with
Professor Emerita status from the
School of the Art Institute in Chicago in June. She has been appointed
Visiting Scholar at the Pembroke
Institute for Feminist Research and
Teaching at Brown University, and
will make the move to Providence,
RI, this summer. subRosa, a cyberfeminist collective of which Faith is
a member, performed their Vulva/
De/ReConstructa, and exhibited
drawings in the “Everybody! Visual Resistance in Feminist Health
Movements, 1969-2009” exhibition
at Carleton College Art Gallery,
MN. The group has been invited
to create an installation for the
Pittsburgh Biennial in September.
Faith will be performing with Kate
Davis at the Virginia Woolf Conference at the University of Glasgow
in June. She will also be exhibiting
the Crocheted Environment in the
“Dance/Draw” exhibition, curated

Tamar Diesendruck’s TELL for
four bass clarinets, and commissioned by NBCG, premiered
November 6, 2010, as a solo
performance with the other three
parts recorded. Performed by Laura
Carmichael in Kortwijk, Belgium,
there were repeat performances
in Istanbul and Tokyo. Still Telling
for 15 players, and commissioned
by the Fromm Foundation, was
premiered by the Callithumpian
Consort and conducted by Stephen
Drury in Boston. Other Floods, for
a cappella chorus, commissioned
and performed by Volti, premiered
March 4, 2011, in San Francisco,
and was conducted by Robert Geary
—repeat performances were held in
Mill Valley and Berkeley, CA. She is
currently on an artist residency at
the VA Center for the Creative Arts
working on a double-bass piece,
Stroll, for a recording project by
bassist Andy Kohn.

Visual Art
Michael Minelli represented WPA
as a panelist discussing artist-run
organizations in LA as part of
ART2102’s “Dispatches and Directions” project last January. The
panel was moderated by artist Miles
Coolidge and included Patrick Meagher of Silvershed, Sean Dockray
of Telic and The Public School and
Stacey Allan from East of Borneo;
CalArts’ new online journal. This
fall, Michael will be exhibiting new
work at WPA in LA and his review

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35

Faculty Notes

Mary Rueﬂe received the William
Carlos Williams Award.

by Helen Molesworth at the ICA in
Boston in October.
Carlos Motta launched the web
and book project “We Who Feel
Differently,” a database documentary and journal that addresses
critical issues of contemporary
queer culture, in May at Gallery,
Bergen, Norway.
Marie Shurkus gave a lecture
on March 24th entitled “Redeﬁning
Representation as Translation” to
the Critical Studies Department
of the Claremont Graduate
University, CA.

Writing
Mary Rueﬂe, is the 2011 winner
of the William Carlos Williams
Award from the Poetry Society of
America for Selected Poems (Wave
Books, 2010). Mary is also a visiting
poet at the University of Texas in
Austin for 2011.
Sue William Silverman’s ﬂash
nonﬁction essay, “We Regret
to Inform You,” is published in
the current issue of the online
journal Defunct, available at http://
tinyurl.com/3w3e8qc. Another ﬂash
nonﬁction piece, “Cupcake Days,”
is included in the Writerlicious
Anthology on Food fromRed
Claw Press.
Patrick Madden’s essay “Where

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(continued)

Am I Now?” published in the
Water~Stone Review, was listed as a
Notable Essay in the Best American
Essays 2010. His book Quotidiana
has been named a ﬁnalist for ForeWord Reviews’ Book of the Year
Awards in the Essays category.
Philip Graham was featured in an
interview on BestinPortugal.com.
Philip lived in Lisbon with his family for a year and wrote The Moon,
Come to Earth: Dispatches from
Lisbon, a travel memoir that talks
about Lisbon and parenthood.
Nancy Eimers, William Olsen,
Jess Row and David Wojahn,
along with two alumni – Bob Hicok
and Jennifer K. Sweeney – were
chosen for the 2011 Pushcart Prize
XXXV Best of the Small Presses.
Jen Bervin is curating the Spring
2011 Center Broadside Reading Series at the Center for Book
Arts in NYC, and co-curating
with Robert Fitterman, “It’s for
You: An Interdisciplinary Festival
of Collaborative Firsts” during
April. She and Christina Davis
worked with Harvard students and
poets from the community on an
installation/textual intervention at
the Harvard Museum of Natural
History, titled “THIS OBJECT HAS
BEEN REMOVED.” On April 15,
she “tweeted” for one day for the
Academy of American Poets.
Mark Cox has a poem in Crazyhorse’s 50th anniversary issue,
and a brief essay in Aspects of
Robinson: Homage to Weldon Kees.
He has recently read at Mesa State
College and Suffolk University,
and in January served as visiting
poet at Ohio University. His reading at February’s AWP conference
will be featured in AWP’s podcast
series.
Abby Frucht’s essay, “The Pest”
is included in a new anthology, He
Said What?, from Seal Press. She has
a new collection of stories forthcoming from Narrative Library,
and is excited to add that she will
be teaching in Tel Aviv for six weeks
this fall.
David Jauss has been appointed a
Contributing Editor of The Writer’s
Chronicle. “The Real Story Behind
Low-Residency MFAs,” an essay by
Jauss about the many advantages
of a low-residency MFA in writing

newsletter summer 2011

program, appears in the February
2011 issue of Writer’s Digest.
Connie May Fowler was writerin-residence at Flagler College in
St. Augustine, FL, this spring. The
paperback release of her latest
novel, How Clarissa Burden Learned
to Fly, will be released July 20th
from Hachette Book Group. She
had two essays recently published
in anthologies: “Connie May is Going to Win the Lottery this Week”
appears in Don’t Quit Your Day
Job: Acclaimed Authors and the Day
Jobs They Quit; and “Big Oil, Big
Sin” appears in unspOILed: Writers
Speak for Florida’s Coast
Rigoberto Gonzalez is the
recipient of the 2011 Shelley
Memorial Award, awarded to a
living American poet by the Poetry
Society of America.
Dawn Cooper taught at the
Gettysburg Review Conference for
Writers in June. Two chapters from
her novel, HAINTS, were published
in May in the online version of
Hunger Mountain.
Douglas Glover recently had
stories published in The Brooklyn
Rail and The New Quarterly Online,
a short essay in the world affairs
magazine Global Brief and a longer
essay on Alice Munro in Canadian
Notes & Queries. He has stories
forthcoming in The Fiddlehead,
descant, Best Canadian Stories and
Short Story Magazine, and continRigoberto Gonzalez was given the
Shelley Memorial Award.

Faculty Notes
ues to publish his online magazine
Numéro Cinq.
Richard McCann was recently
awarded a fellowship to the Rockefeller Foundation Bellagio Center
on Lake Como in Italy, where he’ll
be working on his memoir-in-progress. He has also given talks and/
or readings at the San Francisco
Zen Center, the Chicago Humanities Festival and Marymount
University. This coming fall, he will
be on the faculty of the Bear River
Writers’ Conference, the Fine Arts
Work Center Summer Program, the
Amalﬁ Coast Music Festival and the
VCFA 16th Annual Postgraduate
Writers’ Conference.
Ellen Lesser’s short story,
“Impound,” will be featured in
upstreet number seven, due out this
summer. Other stories in the same
linked collection in progress, about
mothers and teenage daughters in
crisis, have appeared recently in
Antioch Review and North American
Review. Ellen will be leading a short
story workshop in August at the
VCFA annual Postgraduate Writers’
Conference, for which she serves as
director.
Jess Row’s new collection of
stories, Nobody Ever Gets Lost, was
published by FiveChapters Books
in February. His story “The Call of
Blood” was selected for The Best
American Short Stories 2011, edited
by Geraldine Brooks. He also has
stories appearing this spring/summer in Guernica, FiveChapters.
com and Threepenny Review, and
his essay “Playgrounds of the Real”
appears in the May/June issue of
Boston Review.
Xu Xi’s story collection, Access:
Thirteen Tales, will be released in
November 2011 by Signal 8 Press.
Richard Jackson has published:
Last Voyage: Selected Poems of
Giovanni Pascoli through Red
Hen Press; edited Selected Poems
by Iztok Osojnik; and wrote an
introdudction and assisted in editing Ko vdre Senca/When the Shadow
Breaks by Tomaz Salamun. His poems have recently appeared in Brilliant Corners, Crazyhorse, Upstreet,
Atlanta Review, Cutthroat, Asheville
Poetry Review, Grist, Redivider and
online at Verse Daily. He appeared
on two panels at the recent AWP,

(continued)

participated in a workshop on Political Poetry in Slovenia in March,
directed the Meacham Writers’
Workshops in Chattanooga, and
gave readings at Elizabeth College,
Ashland’s MFA program, Big
Hunt Bookstore, Washington, DC,
Virginia Commonwealth University
and Georgia Tech. This summer
he will also be teaching at the Iowa
Summer Festival and the Prague
Workshops. His essays appear in
Aspects of Robinson: Homage to
Weldon Kees, Publication of Slovene
Writers’ Association, Asheville Poetry
Review and Numéro Cinq.

Plan to Fix Everything launches
May 24th with starred reviews from
Kirkus Book Reviews and Publishers Weekly.
Mary Quattlebaum’s picture book, Pirate vs. Pirate, was
recently published by Disney Hyperion. School Library Journal gave
it a “four-Arrrrr! rating.” Mary’s
interview with VCFA faculty member Kathi Appelt, “Find Your Story’s
Emotional Core,” ran in the May
issue of The Writer.
Rita Garcia Williams received
the 2011 Coretta Scott King Author
Award for her novel One Crazy
Summer, published by Amistad.
Tim Wynne-Jones and illustrator Stéphane Jorisch are Canada’s
nominees for the 2012 international
Hans Christian Andersen Awards.
Announced every two years, the
Hans Christian Andersen Awards
are internationally recognized as
the highest honor for children’s
authors and illustrators. Tim’s
thirty-ﬁrst book, Blink & Caution,
has just been launched with starred
reviews piling up, and prepublication buzz resulted in Candlewick
Press reprinting before the book
even went on sale, March 8th.

Writing for
Children and
Young Adults
Alan Cumyn has been nominated
for the 2011 K.M. Hunter Award
for Literature. The winner of the
$8,000 prize, which is given in
recognition of a substantial body
of work as well as to encourage
new creations, will be announced
in May. Alan’s latest novel, Tilt, for
young adults, will be published this
fall by Groundwood Books.
Cynthia Leitich Smith celebrates the release of Blessed from
Candlewick in 2011, which The
Horn Book calls, “A hearty meal
for the thinking vampire reader.”
Cynthia’s numerous spring events
included speaking to librarians
at Brooklyn Public Library and
MFA students at The New School
in NYC. She also appeared as a
featured author at the Southwest
Florida Reading Festival in Ft.
Myers, taught a novel-writing
workshop for SCBWI-Wisconsin
in Madison, and was the judge
for the 2011 Hunger Mountain
Prize for Young Writers. She looks
forward to the release of her ﬁrst
graphic novel, Tantalize: Kieren’s
Story, illustrated by Ming Doyle,
coming from Candlewick in August 2011, and the publication of
her essay “Isolation” in Dear Bully:
Seventy Authors Tell Their Stories,
edited by alum Carrie Jones and
Megan Kelley Hall, coming from
HarperTeen in August 2011.
Uma Krishnaswami’s The Grand

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&

Summer
Fall

Claudia Emerson returns this summer to the MFA-Writing Residency as Distinguished Visiting Faculty

WRITING RESIDENCY
July 10-21, 2011
Di s ti n g u i s h e d
V i s i ti n g F ac ult y
Claudia Emerson was awarded the 2006 Pulitzer Prize
in Poetry for her book Late Wife: Poems and is the
newly appointed Poet Laureate of Virginia. Her newest
collection Figure Studies: Poems was published in 2008.
She is also the author of the poetry collections Pharaoh,
Pharaoh and Pinion: An Elegy, all published in Dave
Smith’s Southern Messenger Poets series. Recipient of a
Witter Bynner Fellowship from the Library of Congress

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newsletter winter 2011

and fellowships from the National Endowment for the
Arts and the Virginia Commission for the Arts, she is
Professor of English and Arrington Distinguished Chair
in Poetry at Mary Washington College in Fredericksburg, Virginia. www.claudiaemerson.org

V is it ing Fic t ion Wr it er
Dan Chaon is the author of the national bestseller
Await Your Reply, named one of the ten best books of
the year by Publishers Weekly, Entertainment Weekly,
Janet Maslin of The New York Times, and Laura Miller
of salon.com. The novel is also listed among the year’s
best ﬁction by the American Library Association and

Residencies
such newspapers as The Washington Post and The
Chicago Tribune. He is also the author of the novel You
Remind Me of Me and the short story collections Fitting
Ends and Among the Missing, and is a ﬁnalist for the
National Book Award. His ﬁction has appeared in many
journals and anthologies, including Best American Short
Stories, The Pushcart Prize, and The O. Henry Prize
Stories. A ﬁnalist for the National Magazine Award in
Fiction, he is also a recipient of the Academy Award
in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and
Letters. www.danchaon.com

Al u mn i F i c ti on / C re a t iv e
No n fi c ti o n Re a d e r
Neela Vaswani is the author of the short story collection Where the Long Grass Bends, the memoir You
Have Given Me a Country, and the forthcoming YA
novel, Same Sun Here. Recipient of the O. Henry Prize,
her work has been widely anthologized and published
in journals such as Epoch, Shenandoah, American
Literary Review, and Prairie Schooner. She has been a
visiting-writer-in-residence and lecturer at more than
100 institutions, including the Whitney Museum, the
Smithsonian, and Skidmore College. She has a Ph.D. in
Cultural Studies and teaches at Spalding University’s
brief-residency MFA in Writing program. An education activist in India and the United States, Vaswani is
founder of the Storylines Project with the New York
Public Library. www.ncvfoundation.org and
www.neelavaswani.com

translator of Taslima Nasrin’s Revenge. She has authored
three collections of poems: Red Shoes, Darling, and
Memoir. Her play Mourning Pictures was produced on
Broadway and published in The New Women’s Theatre:
Ten Plays by Contemporary American Women, which
she edited. She has received awards in poetry and playwriting from the NEA, The New York State Council for
the Arts, and a Guggenheim Fellowship in nonﬁction.
www.honormoore.com

V is it ing Tr ans lat or
Patty Crane’s poetry has appeared in American Letters
& Commentary, Ars Interpres, Bellevue Literary Review,
Fugue, RUNES, The Comstock Review, The Massachusetts
Review, The Spoon River Poetry Review, upstreet, and
West Branch, among others. Her reviews and essays
have appeared in Poetry International and The Writer’s
Chronicle. Awards include the Two Rivers Review Poetry
Prize and Atlanta Review’s International Publication
Prize. Her translation of Tomas Tranströmer’s The
Sorrow Gondola will be featured in the Spring issue of
Blackbird. Having graduated from VCFA in 2004, she
has recently returned to her home in western Massachusetts after three years of living in Sweden.

WRITING FOR CHILDREN
AND YOUNG ADULTS
RESIDENCY
July 10-21, 2011

V i s i ti n g C rea t iv e
No n fi c ti o n Wr it e r

Alum ni V is it ing Wr it er

Honor Moore has authored both the memoir The
Bishop’s Daughter and the biography The White
Blackbird: A Life of the Painter Margarett Sargent by Her
Granddaughter. The memoir was named an Editor’s
Choice by The New York Times, a Favorite Book of 2008
by The Los Angeles Times, and a ﬁnalist for the National
Book Critics Circle Award. She is the editor of Library
of America’s Poems from the Women’s Movement and the

Jan Spivey Gilchrist illustrated the Coretta Scott King
Award winner Nathaniel Talking, the Coretta Scott King
Honor Book Night on Neighborhood Street, and Me &
Neesie, all written by Eloise Greenﬁeld. She wrote and
co-illustrated My America with Ashley Bryan, which was
named a Parents’ Choice Recommended Award winner.
An inductee into the International Literary Hall of Fame
for Writers of African Descent, she received an MFA in

Writing for Children from Vermont College and a
doctoral degree in English from Madison University.

VISUAL ART RESIDENCY
July 29-August 7

V i s i ti n g Wri t e r
Walter Dean Myers has written over 90 books for
children, with his most recent work Dope Sick,
published in 2009. He has won many prominent
awards, including the Michael L. Printz Award for
Excellence in Literature for Young Adults, the Jane
Addams Children’s Book Award, the Margaret A.
Edwards Award for his contribution to young adult
literature, two Newbery Honors, ﬁve Coretta Scott
King Awards, four Coretta Scott King Honors, and
two National Book Award Finalists.
www.walterdeanmyers.net

V i s i ti n g Wri t e r
Diane Stanley is the author and illustrator of more
than ﬁfty books for children, noted especially for her
series of picture book biographies. Shaka, King of the
Zulus was named a New York Times Best Illustrated
Book, and Leonardo da Vinci received the Orbis Pictus
Award for Outstanding Nonﬁction from the National
Council for Teachers of English. Recipient of The
Washington Post/Children’s Book Guild Award for
Nonﬁction for the body of her work, she has also
written and illustrated numerous picture books,
including The Giant and the Beanstalk and Rumpelstiltskin’s Daughter, as well as novels for older
readers, such as Saving Sky, Bella at Midnight,
nd The Mysterious Matter of I. M. Fine.
www.dianestanley.com

4TH ANNUAL VCFA
MFA IN WRITING FOR
CHILDREN & YOUNG
ADULTS ALUMNI
MINI-REZ
July 15-17, 2011
Held on campus each July, this event combines
elements of an alumni reunion, professional networking, and the traditional VCFA residency. The weekend
includes the chance to rigorously workshop a piece with
a professional editor and a group of writing peers
as well as to gain inside information on the business
of writing from established editors and agents. Also
offered are faculty lectures, craft discussions, and the
opportunity to participate in Special Day festivities
(see info under residency description). The central
feature of the weekend is a series of master classes with
author and WC&YA alumna Deborah Wiles, author of
two picture books as well as Love, Ruby Lavender, Each
Little Bird That Sings, and The Aurora County All-Stars,
all award-winning books.

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newsletter summer 2011

VISITING LECTURER
Rick Lowe is an artist, architect, urban designer,
developer, and activist. Over the past 20 years, he has
worked with art institutions, participating in exhibitions
and developing community-based art projects.
In 1993, Lowe founded Project Row Houses, which
turned 22 “shotgun” houses in the middle of one of
Houston’s poorest neighborhoods into art galleries,
workshop spaces, ofﬁces, and housing for young single
mothers. Now a well established public art program, it
has become the model for bringing local people together
to engage their own creative energies and aesthetic values
to produce a “collective expression” and reinstate a community. Lowe has served as artist-in-residence at universities throughout the United States. He has participated
in exhibitions and programs internationally and worked
as a guest artist on numerous community projects.

VISITIN G LECTU RER
Carol Armstrong of the Department of the History
of Art at Yale University teaches and writes about 19th
century French painting, the history of photography,
the history and practice of art criticism, feminist theory,
and the representation of women and gender in art and
visual culture. She has published books and essays on
Edgar Degas, Edouard Manet, Paul Cézanne, and 19th
and 20th century photography, as well as having curated exhibitions at Princeton University Art Museum,
the Drawing Center in New York, the Yale Center for
British Art, and the J. Paul Getty Museum. A frequent
contributor to October and Artforum magazines, she
continues to be an active art critic. Current projects
include a book on Cézanne, modern physics, and
schizophrenia, as well as a series of essays about still life,
description, and the “feminine” principle.

MUSIC COMPOSITION
RESIDENCY
August 9-15, 2011
The inaugural residency of the Music Composition
program celebrates the musical diversity of our founding faculty and an exciting collaboration with our ﬁrst
visiting ensemble.
The faculty represents a broad cross-section of contemporary music. Rick Baitz, Don DiNicola, and Ravi
Krishnaswami will work with students who want to
compose for ﬁlm, video, and computer applications, as
well as others hoping to branch out into the business.
John Mallia’s expertise in electronic and multi-media
composition will support the work of students eager
to explore new technologies. Tamar Diesendruck,
Jonathan Bailey Holland, John Fitz Rogers, Roger
Zahab, and Michael Early will contribute a variety of
approaches to contemporary composition for groups
ranging from small chamber ensembles to symphony
orchestras. Master teacher Andy Jaffe will bring his

The Callithumpian Consort will participate in the ﬁrst MFA-Music Composition Residency.

wealth of experience playing, teaching, and writing
about jazz, while Ayn Inserto will add her fresh
perspective on jazz to a future residency.
A centerpiece of the residency will be three days with
The Callithumpian Consort, the critically-acclaimed
new music ensemble. Made up of a senior band of
soloists, the Consort is ﬂexible in size and makeup,
enabling the group to tackle unusual repertoire in nonstandard or larger chamber ensembles or to take part
in experimental projects. Their repertoire encompasses
a huge stylistic spectrum, from the classics of the last
50 years to the avant-garde, experimental jazz, and rock.
Dedicated to both commissioning and recording new
music, they have worked with composers John Cage,
Lee Hyla, John Zorn, Michael Finnissy, Franco Donatoni, Lukas Foss, Steve Reich, Helmut Lachenmann,
John Luther Adams, Frederic Rzewski, Christian Wolff,
and many others. www.callithumpian.org

GRAPHIC DESIGN
RESIDENCY
October 15-23, 2011
This ﬁrst residency highlights the work of our founding
faculty through presentations on Communications
Theory, Typography, Book Design, Multi-Media Digital
Design, Sound Design Integration, Design Theory
and Criticism, Branding, and Sustainability in Design,
among other topics.

Matthew Monk, Program Chair, teaches graphic design
at Rhode Island School of Design. A book designer
and painter who explores systems, typography, and
narrative through experimental collage and mixed
media projects, his interests also include communications theory and semiotics. Silas Munro serves as
Design Director at Housing Works, combating the dual
crises of homelessness and HIV/AIDS through design
and advocacy. Ziddi Msangi, a Tanzanian raised in the
United States, investigates how concepts of ethnography
and narrative inﬂuence design and media. Nicole Juen
approaches art and design from a process-oriented
pedagogy. She teaches at RISD and directs the collaborative studio Matter Design with her husband, Rafael
Attias. Attias is a native of Venezuela who explores
digital media and the relationship of sound to design
and motion graphics. He was recently Program Director
for Pixilerations, a New Media showcase of installations,
concert performances, and ﬁlm and video screenings.
Natalia Ilyin, a writer of design criticism and theory,
is also a notable lecturer and critic at graphic design
programs around the country. Author of several books,
including Chasing the Perfect and Blonde Like Me, she is
also an accomplished graphic designer. Bethany Koby’s
professional design experiences focus on branding and
sustainability. Based in London, she contributes this
unique combination of design interests and skills to
international projects. Yoon Soo Lee is both a professor of graphic design and a visual artist. Her primary
interests probe concepts of identity and how identity is
presented through media and visual culture.

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newsletter summer 2011

41

VCFA is a hybrid of community,
arts, and education.
Here’s some of what’s going on:
VCFA
QVCFA’s

Board of Trustees welcomes
Eliza Browning as its newest member.
As director of Crane Digital at Crane &
Co., she oversees the company’s online
business and digital strategy. She has
worked as a journalist in digital media
for news organizations including CNN,
ABC News, and the Associated Press.

the publication of Sowon Kwon’s book,
donghab, ﬁrst in the VCFA Talks series.
Plans are underway for our alumni event in
Los Angeles at the 2011 CAA conference.
All ideas are welcome.
QMarch

saw yet another sold-out Novel
Writing Retreat on campus. This working
weekend for serious writers of middlegrade and young adult books brings

vcfa news bites
QCollege

Hall has received an upgrade.
The third and fourth ﬂoors have been
renovated to create more ofﬁce and
classroom space to accommodate the new
programs. The architects’ sensitivity to
the way light moves through the building
is apparent in the use of glass and other
translucent materials.
EVENTS

QAWP

Conference was the most productive ever for both the Writing and
Writing for Children and Young Adult
programs. Highlights included a special
reading in celebration of the MFA-W 30th
anniversary, opportunities to talk with
many qualiﬁed prospective students, and
a record number of VCFA attendees who
reveled in the opportunity to reconnect
with classmates and faculty.

QVCFA’s

College Art Association conference reception in New York was a
wonderful success, with a crowd of
Artist-Teachers, current and prospective
students, alumni, and faculty celebrating

42

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newsletter summer 2011

established writer/teachers as well as
editors and agents together with novelists
who can choose from a critical or writing
track. Look for the possibility of a nonﬁction element to be added next year.
QVCFA

held its ﬁrst Open House on
April 16. Over 60 prospective students
and guests joined faculty, staff, alumni,
and current students to present all ﬁve
programs. The day included mini-lectures,
discussions, and hands-on workshops to
give visitors a sense of residency activities.
Evaluations of the event were overwhelmingly positive, inspiring plans for the
future.

QFaculty

David Deitcher and Faith Wilding
presented on a panel, “The Growing Popularity of Low-Residency MFA Programs and
the Needs They Serve” at the TransCultural
Exchange’s 2011 Conference on International Opportunities in the Arts in Boston,
MA.

QVCFA’s

Interdisciplinary Conference
debuts this July. Designed to respond to

growing interest in cross-program experiences, the conference offers workshops,
seminars, panel discussions, and other
events in off-the-page writing, writing
and image-based communications, book
arts, graphic literature/illustration, writing
across age groups, and performancebased art, among other topics. Faculty
from Writing, Writing for Children and
Young Adults, Visual Arts, and Graphic

See the Alumni section of the website
for information.
SCHOLARSHIPS AND AWARDS
QVCFA President Thomas Greene has
announced ﬁve new VCFA Grants for
students accepted to the inaugural class
of the MFA in Music Composition
program. Each scholarship is for

vcfa news bites
Design join other invited guest lecturers
on campus for three days of collaboration
with alumni and current students.
QVCFA’s

Institutional Advancement/
Alumni Affairs ofﬁce is planning
receptions around the country. These
all-college affairs bring all ﬁve programs
together as one community. The ﬁrst
one in Washington, DC, was a wonderful gathering at the MOCA-DC Gallery in
Georgetown. Future events in New York
City, Los Angeles, and Massachusetts are
in the works. If you would like to host one
in your area, please contact Ann Cardinal
at ann.cardinal@vermontcollege.edu.

QThe

ﬁrst VCFA Alumni Writing Workshop is also in process. Beginning July 15,
VCFA will offer 12-week online workshops for alumni of the MFA in Writing
program. Offering support for alumni
looking to redevelop writing habits that
may have lapsed since graduation, the
workshops also provide opportunities to
re-engage with the VCFA community.

$8,000, or $2,000 per semester for all
four semesters. The new scholarships
advance the program’s aim to assemble
a diverse class bringing together
composers in many genres.
QMFA-WCYA

announces the ﬁrst winner
of the Norma Fox Mazer Scholarship,
Miriam McNamara, for her manuscript
Pirate’s Promise. This scholarship aligns
with Norma’s young adult writing
and recognizes both her support for the
program and her prominence in the ﬁeld
of children’s literature. In addition to the
$2,000 award, the winning piece will be
read and responded to by Norma’s editor
at HarperCollins.

Q Sarah Seltzer, a student in the MFA
Writing Program, has received a Winter
2011 Web Marketing Fellowship. Sarah
has been working to create and maintain
a solid VCFA presence on social networking
sites, build online relationships with
the literary, art, and music world, and
present a more intimate view of VCFA life
for prospective students.

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newsletter summer 2011

43

QCurrent

student Amy Stout from Red
Lodge, MT, has been awarded a Winter
2011 Visual Art Market Research Fellowship. She has prior experience as a
Research and Analysis Assistant at North
Idaho College.

QJennifer

Renko steps in as Program Director for the new MFA in Graphic Design.
She has worked in the ﬁeld of Art and
Design Admissions, most recently at Lyme
Academy College of Fine Arts as the Assistant Dean of Admissions and Continuing
Education.

QVCFA

Fellowship recipient Sheryl Scarborough has enlisted ﬁve writers to blog
once a week, introducing the College to a
host of new writers from top sites in the
ﬁeld. While the initial effort focuses on
children’s writing, she plans to expand the
model to other programs.
STAFF

QFounding

Academic Dean Gary Moore
is retiring from VCFA. Following the soldout success of his play Burning in China at
last year’s New York International Fringe
Festival, he will now concentrate on his
plays, poems, and novels. He’s chosen his
68th birthday in November as the time for
his exit. The College is in the process of
recruiting a new Dean with the assistance
of a higher education search ﬁrm.

QGary

Library transitions from Union
Institute to VCFA control on July 1, under
the leadership of Jim Nolte, Library Director. Jim is a leader in blending digital and
traditional library services. As an academic
librarian, public librarian, and library designer and developer, he has created four
electronic libraries. Jim also brings skills
in the use of e-learning technology and
web-based communication tools.

QPeter

Timpone has recently stepped
in to VCFA’s new position of IT Director.
Peter brings expertise in network administration, managing complex projects,
and providing strategic leadership on the
information technology needs of dynamic, growing organizations. Currently
pursuing an MBA, his BA includes a minor
in Studio Art.

QPeter

Nielsen is leaving VCFA at the
end of June to launch HigherMind
MediaWorks—a new business specializing
in marketing for higher education. He
has served as VCFA’s Executive Director of
Marketing and Enrollment for the past
two years. (www.highermindmedia.com.)

QCarol

Beatty joins VCFA as Program
Director of the new MFA in Music Composition. She has spent the past 25 years
working in higher education administration for several colleges, all on the
Vermont College campus.

QLyn

Chamberlin joins VCFA on July 1
as Executive Director of Marketing and
Communications. Previously serving in
communications positions at MIT and Harvard, Lyn brings a wealth of experience in
higher education, communications, and
public relations to the role. As a recent
graduate of the MFA in Writing program,
she is also passionate about both the mission and life of the College.

Vermont College of Fine Arts is deﬁned
by the successes of our students. When we see alums like Kate
Hosford write stories that empower their readers and give them greater conﬁdence, we
see the power of art to create a more humane world. We see the social context that
helped that student produce that work.

We see the support and encouragement that
gave that individual the training and
conﬁdence to pursue their passion.
When you give to Vermont College
of Fine Arts, you help individuals take the next step in their artistic lives. You
create the energy and set in motion the process that brings artists and writers into the
world.

You are the beginning of their story.

Each year

the VCFA Fund helps augment student scholarships, academic pro-

gramming, facilities improvements, technology upgrades, and new initiatives that keep
the College a vital and dynamic learning environment.

Your contribution is guaranteed to have
a positive impact on the lives of our
students.

Your gift leads directly
to our students’ success . . .

The art of giving
Please consider a donation to VCFA.

ONLINE

MAIL

PHONE

s You may

s You may send

s Call 866-934-VCFA,

make a secure

a check payable to the

extension 8599 to make

contribution online at

VCFA Fund to:

a credit card donation.

vermontcollege.edu/give

Executive Director

Further details about

of Institutional

giving options are

Advancement

available at

VCFA

vermontcollege.edu/give

36 College Street
46

VCFA

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Montpelier, VT 05602

newsletter summer 2011

Cycles of Success
As a charitable
non-proďŹ t 501(c)(3)
organization,
contributions to VCFA
are fully tax deductible
according to U.S. law.